Sheep Recognise Barack Obama From PhotoSheep learnt to recognise Barack Obama after being shown his photo a few dozen times, said a study which suggested our four-legged friends may be smarter than we think. The former US president was one of four celebrities used in a test of the woolly creatures’ face-recognition skills, along with Harry Potter actress Emma Watson, British TV host Fiona Bruce and American actor Jake Gyllenhaal, the research team said.
“We chose these people because there were lots of images of each person available online, both front-on and taken at different angles,” study co-author Jennifer Morton of the University of Cambridge. “We also chose them because we were sure that our sheep had never met them in person!”.
Morton and a team trained eight sheep to recognise the famous faces from a frontal photo of each of them. Every time an animal picked the celebrity face instead of a different image on a second screen, it would get a food reward. “This face recognition task will allow us to test whether or not sheep carrying the Huntington’s disease gene mutation are impaired in their ability to think and reason,” Morton explained.
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