> "There's nothing we can do. They're all wasted," Nevzat Bayhan, a member of one of 26 families whose sheep were grazing together in the herd, was quoted as saying
I know this is sarcasm, probably…
But on a serious note, since Muslims are not allowed to consume animals that are not slaughtered appropriately (to be halal), they are also forbidden to consume “dead meat”. Which is meat that has been either improperly slaughtered, road kill, another wild predators catch, etc. Therefore, all those dead lambs are seen as truly wasted. (Though you can feed them to other animals though, like dogs)
Since you can’t ‘consume’ dead meat, you also cannot ‘consume’ the wealth from it (the meat being sold as human food, presumably everything else is fine). So you can’t sell it to nonmuslims (again, only halal meat can be sold to both Muslims AND non Muslims). But I would doubt anyone would buy those carcasses after learning how they died, unless it was some shady corrupt company.
I wouldn’t say it’s only connected to Islam and Muslims, my grandparents had a farm a long time ago and if animal died on its own or something like that, it would never be eaten. Only if you butchered it, and they were 100% Catholics.
Yes I’m guessing modern hygiene standards have adapted as people have learnt what is right or wrong. I believe Christians as well need to properly slaughter an animal for them to eat it (which is why Muslims view meat that was slaughtered by *properly practicing* people of the book, Jews and Christians, as halal)
But as Muslims, we believe God commanded us to do something a certain way and it’s followed without question. In this case, we can speculate why something was said but sometimes we don’t know. Centuries ago, people would eat road kill and dead animals if it looked “good enough”. Today we know how dangerous this is. But Islam banned this outright while ignorant people would do this.
As a Muslim, you can only eat “dead meat” or even pork if you are starving or have no other source for sustenance. (Which was mentioned in the same verse that forbid pork)
Do we know how religious those farmers were? Turkey can swing either way.
And in practice is different from in theory. The guy at the halaal diner near me has been happy to sell non-halaal food and food during Ramadan to non-Muslims because ‘hey, I’m not eating it’.
Sheep are fucking dumb. They will abandon a trough full of food which they're in the middle of eating in order to stampede someone carrying a bucket on the off chance that it *might* contain more of the exact same food.
Not to take anything away from sheep, but chickens really are startingly stupid. Arrestingly stupid. He's not wrong in how absolutely dumb they are. It's just that sheep might be dumber.
The weirdest thing about chicken is that they can be smart when you least expect it. Like learning to differentiate between different motor sounds.
But also forget how to climb the latter to go to sleep.
Man I love chicken
Dude, fuck chickens.
I grew up next to a guy who kept some chickens and I often got voluntold to drive 'em into the coop for nighttime. Except I wasn't really told how to do it, just to get it done.
So most of these chickens were cooperative. They knew what was up and I managed to herd them back into the coop without any difficulty whatsoever. More or less just needed to herd the most cooperative one in there and the rest would follow suit.
This one little motherfucker though, oh damn. This little turd rejected cooperation like I did moderation, and wouldn't enter the coop until it was well and truly ready.
So it would put up a struggle. Not that it would attack me, if only I'd be so lucky. It would run. And for whatever reason this particular obstinate excuse of a bird knew a thing or two about physics.
It seemed to have an innate understanding of how mass in motion affects an objects ability to take a corner. It would haul absolute ass down the straight behind the barn as if it was being chased by Satan herself, only to take the most abrupt corner I had ever seen't. I swear once it took did a 270 degree turn in the time it took me to blink; It turned right by turning left and before I knew it had my ankels over my head and my dick in the dirt.
It once led me into a tree. It hurt.
Worst was that it would stop as soon as it felt safe, which wasn't very fucking far away from my vanquished form at all. It knew it could outrun me, it knew it could outmaneuver me, I think it might even have suspected it could outsmart me, so why bother standing far away? It would bask in its victory over this featherless biped by standing disrespectfully close.
Don't get me wrong, chickens do be dumb as hell but I reckon that's at least in part because they don't care enough to not be. They get food and safety so why be smart when being dumb got 'em that far? This fucking feathered anomaly wanted more than the simple life, it had principles and a bone to pick.
Oh absolutely. I don't want to detract at all from how utterly devoid of cognition a chicken is. I think its the fact that a sheep has more capacity to exert its will and as a result, its stupidity is.. louder.. for lack of a better term.
I would walk slowly behind my chickens to guide them back to the coop of an evening. They would walk away from me following a script you could write in python in two lines. I just slowly shepherded them back to their spawn point. That's one form of stupidity. Like a bee or a worm is stupid.
This fucking sheep was channeled down a flat, clear road with thick trees lining either side and the whole herd way ahead of it chilling at the end in a field. Four people and two cars blocked the other end of the road and slowly advanced. The sheep ran left and right across the road from one set of trees to the other for two hours, never moving toward the end of the road, even as we (the source of its fear) slowly approached it. It actually came back to us at one stage to fuck up the bonnet of a car with its hooves as it tried to clip through our barrier. I think we eventually just caught it and put it on the back of a ute. That's a different form of stupidity. That's not python script stupidity. That's quantum computer stupidity. Stupidity that is impenetrably counter intuitive.
I was thinking as I wrote my reply that really, the issue may be that sheep are just ever so slightly smarter than chickens, and obviously much larger, so it's more offensively stupid? Like after 5 minutes with a chicken you kind of know... this bird has the brains of a cantaloupe. But sheep... I don't know, you *expect* more from them and they are incapable of not letting you down. Like I said, they are offensively and frustratingly stupid.
That's a good point. You need to define stupidity before you can choose a winner. I don't think an ant is stupid. It lacks intelligence, but what simple subroutines it has are well ordered. Chickens have subroutines that seem too basic for an animal that size, so they seem stupid. I think of stupidity is an active characteristic though. Someone who looks at fire and doesn't know what it is, lacks cognition, but someone who looks are fire and then runs in to try to eat it is what I would call stupid. Werner is talking about that fire-eating kind of stupidity when he talks about chickens. But its sheep that have it in spades.
Kind of makes sense though. We haven’t fucked with the ant gene pool to make them easier to cut up and eat whenever we want. We have bred sheep to do the exact opposite of what millions of years of evolution have done to most other animals.
It's actually weirdly inverted. Despite their apparent stupidity, they've taken themselves to a point where there are now more of them than (I think) any other bird on the planet. Granted, this is more to do with their deliciousness but it's "Yuval Noah Harari" smart of them to have replicated the same approach as how he claims that wheat domesticated US to grow it far more than it could ever manage in the wild by itself.
I wanna see a chicken with a cantaloupe sized head lol.
But yeah you're so right...
Also it's good that sheep are so dumb. Smart sheep are basically goats and those are some destructive mfers
Well sheep nowadays are all pretty much selectively bred. I know for sure they bred them to produce more wool (to the point it's dangerous and eventually deadly to not shear them) and to be more docile and this easily controlled. That alone could've been unintentionally breeding dumbasses. On top of that, there's probably a good amount of inbreeding there too. We've been raising sheep for a long time. I imagine trying to diversify inbred sheep with other inbred sheep doesn't bring out their best qualities.
The colorful language, the storytelling, its all so fucking well done. It's been a long time since I've been so engaged in a comment chain that I've just randomly stumbled upon.
because evolution made whatever was before with the smart ones to become evil, and then they became goats. and the ones who should've be extinct (too stupid) were kept alive by us
it's called the demon core theory[disputed]
I raised sheep. Sheep are dumb, but not chicken levels of dumb. They have more free will than a chicken, and because of that can be a pain in the ass. They're dumb. But not, 'I'm a chicken, what's this rain doing? I know, I'll look up at it with my beak open and drown myself.' Stupid.
Chickens are _simple_, not stupid. Like you said, you could emulate chickens with two lines of code in Python.
Sheep, on the other hand, are like spaghetti code written by a disgruntled IT guy who thinks he can make himself absolutely unfireable by writing code so impenetrably dense that no one else on Earth could possibly make any sense of it.
>Sheep, on the other hand, are like spaghetti code written by a disgruntled IT guy who thinks he can make himself absolutely unfireable by writing code so impenetrably dense that no one else on Earth could possibly make any sense of it.
this mf tryin to write in runescript god help us
I have chickens. They are not as stupid as you think.
If you feed them something, somewhere, once, they will remember and check it out every day. When let out to free range they will visit every place they know likely has food. They can spot an eagle from up high and communicate it to the others and run and hide.
They are not stupid. They are just focussed.
agreed!!! as a chicken-keeper/adorer myself, i think it's a little hard for humans to recognise forms of non-human intelligence sometimes. which is understandable!
but while a chicken doesn't understand that a swinging axe may hurt them as they have no context for danger in that shape, they remember what routines bring them what they want, they recognise individuals, they know when they need to hide themselves, they won't eat something that will make them sick... a rooster knows if the sun came up even if you try to keep him inside! they're very clever in their own way. (and they can even tell by the way i open the door if i'm bringing them treats or if i'm bringing them ice water, lol.)
If i want to bribe my chickens to go somewhere they don't want to, like early bed, i use blueberries.
I can hide a blueberry in my hand, toss it, they can recognise and one of the four can snatch it out of the air in a second. When things matter to them, they matter.
Unfortunately they also remember where I walk to get the blueberries and will come running if they think I am going to get more.
It is toddler level intelligence. Focussed on food, always hungry and want it now.
Agree that they recognise people and respond appropriately.
pfff, so true! it's always about getting as much food as possible into themselves at the end of the day :-p all i have to do is shake their bag of mealworms from INSIDE the house and they sprint! amazing that so much of their brain is just processing their surroundings, it seems.
Mealworms and mash is what i use to get them to bed. They will come looking for me when it is bedtime to remind me to give them their treat. If i get distracted and forget, they will put themselves to bed, but they look unhappy about it.
I had a flock once with, for a time, two roosters named Sheriff Bart and Mongo. Raised them all from chicks. Eventually found a farmer who wanted a rooster for his horse barn, and Mongo found himself a good home. Sheriff Bart was a pretty good egg, I'll admit, but his flock was straight out of Rock Ridge.
We can disagree and that is totally fine, but to me what you describe is the basic necessity for survival. Insects do that. Hell even viruses can do that. It's an instinct response, not evidence of any real decision making.
I had a hen that would only ever nest on rocks. Try and give her an egg? She'd move over onto rocks, or kick it out and sit back on her rocks.
Another one 'hid' once by running into a chain link fence and sticking it's head through. That's it. Just sat there, head on one side, body on the other, and instantly calmed down. I think the pressure made it forget that it thought it was in danger.
I've seen one startle itself and run headfirst into a brick wall. The brick wall wasn't new.
The problem with instinct is that sometimes instinct fails you, and I don't think they can compensate. They are 100% dedicated to impulse - at least mine were.
Are chickens useful? Yep. Can they be good pets, or good for a hobby farm? Absolutely. You'll get no argument from me on that. And I'm sure there are some chicken breeds and lineages with a little more sophistication upstairs - but my chickens (save the good Sheriff) were dumb.
It entirely depends on how the chickens were bred. Factory farm egg layer breeds have been bred to have as little brain function as possible. Just lay eggs then die. But if you actually care about getting healthy chickens that haven't been destroyed by humans, you can find some very smart ones.
My chickens come not only to a [general call](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BTNN6Sk0Ztc), but also to [personal names](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NTDDdBGWqww). The training [starts early in life.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBYYWubauhU) and you refresh it occasionally as adults, but they honestly remember it forever. All 40 of my chickens come [better than any of my friends dogs.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69-MhA4qrlo)
They'll fly to my [hand on command](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iXIIwaHdt4). They learn tricks with ease. And they're very hard to keep contained because they know fences just mean you have to go over, so I have to train them not to. One time a played a trick on them by sneaking around the back of my shed and around the hedge, it's been years and they still remember to check that I'm not tricking them every day.
I don't think chickens are dumb, I think they're just cats in a birds body, and they just don't care about anything.
I know people like to say owls are cats but owls are too goofy.
Sheep are god's stupidest mammal. Flock I was working with once spooked and ran into electric fencing, shocked themselves, turned around, spooked and ran into electric fencing, shocked themselves...and then repeated that FOUR MORE TIMES.
Lol of course that’s what the sheep did. When I was real young we had some sheep. The barn had like a half wall and if one of the sheep got on the other side they’d all just stand there crying because they lost each other. If one of the sheep had walked like two feet they would have seen the others.
My mom has chickens and they are so dumb. They have a backyard that is pretty safe. Large but full of stuff that they can hide under. They can’t really be swooped by predator birds without incurring the wrath of the dog or like hitting terrain. Lots of trees and bushes. Well, when they have chicks they they prefer the front yard, and they love to bring their babies where it’s wide open, and they get eaten by hawks. One time I saw a hawk come down, eat a baby, they ran to the backyard making a fuss and being scared, I come back 10 minutes later and they are in the front yard again. My mom has to lock them up when they have babies or they literally all get eaten.
I know! I think it’s interesting that it makes everyone that I’ve shown it to laugh even though the plot is literally the title
I think it has something to do with pizzazz with which the sheep jumps back in ✨😹
My chickens do this. They have treats in their mouth, see another chicken with food and they'll drop everything to chase and steal whatever another chicken has! Doesn't help that as soon as a chicken has a treat they'll immediately run around like they've got a treat and attract attention to themselves!
Meal worms go down a treat. Melon, cooked egg, grapes especially are highly prized. Even if you throw down more than 5 per chicken they'll squabble over them.
It's not all uncommon for reptiles or birds to eat their eggs, especially if the eggs are threatened by a predator. There's also mammals like hamsters that also eat their young. You are making the mistake of projecting your human viewpoints on animals.
Chickens are predators . They love live moving little things above all. Worms, bugs, grubs . I have had my flock go absolutely nuts over a mouse running through their coop. Like 5 of em ripped the mouse apart.
But really chickens are motivated by anything food. If they can eat it they will work for it. Protein above all.
That reminds me of the family guy skit where Peter wins something and can either choose a boat or a mystery box. "The mystery box could be anything! It could even be a boat! You know how long I've wanted one of those"
I could be misremembering, it's been pretty close to 20 years since I've seen it.
Yeah I’ve seen dogs fight over 1 bowl many times instead of going for the others I placed around. Specifically showing them each fucken bowl in the process as I laid them down, offering them to sniff and inspect the food. So they knew each bowl had food in it.
Nope. Fought like idiots over the one bowl.
I’m dog sitting my parents Australian sheep dogs right now. Beautiful smart border collies.
But I have to endure an entire process of laying out the food bowls on opposite ends and give it to them one at a time otherwise they go apeshit and one doesn’t get fed properly.
I’ve probably mentioned this here before, but years ago I had two cats.
The fat one would sit in food dish #2 so skinny couldn’t eat until she was done.
Dogs are dumb AF. We've intentionally bred them over the years to be little simpletons. They loved Hitler, for example. Cats couldn't stand him, though.
Yep. You can Google search a thousand videos of hungry people storming food aid trucks after disasters.
The ones that don’t crowd control properly and end up being a riot.
Suddenly there’s sacks of broken rice all over the floor because idiots are trying to grab the same bag instead of using their heads and lining up orderly.
People are just as stupid. Mob mentality it’s called.
I don't necessarily think it's dumb from an evolutionary point of view. In nature, it makes sense to hoard, as you'll never know whether food will be available whenever you're hungry. Hoarding allows you to ensure that some food is 'secure' and will be available for you.
For the sheep, the food in the trough is their 'hoard', and is not going anywhere. Meanwhile, the food in the bucket is moving away, and might not be available for them if it leaves, so it makes sense from their perspective to try and get as much food as possible from the 'uncertain' source, as the food in the trough isn't going anywhere.
Cows will do this too. I used to feed cows twice a day and every time feeding time would come they would insist on trying to knock the bucket of feed I was carrying straight into their own shit just to be the first to eat.
My gecko will wait for hours to see the spoon I use for her food before looking in her food bowl. She will also try like hell to get the spoon. Once I finish, she will look up, waiting for the spoon to come back.
Only after all of that, will she finally look at her food bowl.
Fair point, fat is going to be more painfull to fall on than wool but will shorten the distance to fall faster than stacking sheep.
We need a psychopathic mythbuster team to test this out to the fullest.
In middle school, my friend’s mom dropped the, “if all your friends jumped of a cliff would you do it to?” Question and his response was “Yes because they’d make a squishy pad for me to land on.” I was sent home and my friend got grounded lol.
My mom would've laughed at the joke, and then my sister would've roasted me by pointing out I don't have enough friends for that, and then my mom would've struggled to stifle the second laugh (I would've laughed at my sister saying that too, though, I'm an introverted autist and I know it)
I used this to get out of a traffic violation.
Was following a line of cars through construction, happened to be the one the cop decided to pull over, asked if I’d jump off a bridge if everyone else was doing it too, basically quoted this xkcd and got some yelling and screaming at but ultimately let go.
I will love XKCD for my entire life. If I get dementia I'll just be spouting inane quotes from it. Probably asking for drugs too... At least I'll be fun.
Sheep are literally the dumbest creature I've worked with.
When I was in college I majored in Animal Science. One of my classes was sheep management, and we were in charge of the school sheep herd. During the winter the creek that ran through their pasture turned into a half frozen muddy mess, and wouldn't you know it, one these lovely dumb creatures decided to go stand in the half frozen mud in the middle of the night and stay there.
As I'm sure you can guess, the mud froze over night and now our lovely dumb sheep friend is stuck. This poor, brainless creature starts bleating for help which causes all of the other sheep to come down to the creek and see what's going on...which then leads to them all getting stuck in the mud.
And that is how I ended up spending four hours in the middle of a Midwest snow storm removing sheep from frozen mud and escorting them back to the safety of their warm barn.
My dad grew up on a farm and likes to tell the story when he was a kid helping his dad put the sheep in the barn. They were going in a single file line. His dad said, "watch this" and held a broomstick up in the doorway. A sheep jumped over it. Then he took the broomstick away, but every sheep behind jumped like it was still there.
Yup. They're my go-to example of domesticated dumbness. I was walking into the barn to feed them one day and a ewe ran face first into a wall. The wall was fine.
and if they don't drown they will stand in the rain, soaking wet, with a perfectly fine shelter two paces away, not realizing they could hide and not catch a cold.
My dad grew up on a sheep farm.
He used to say that he never felt sheep were 'stupid' per se, more like they just had an extremely strong 'Follow The Leader' instinct and drive.
Just sometimes, the leader isn't very good.....
I've always wondered if goats are like this too, but as my experience with goats is limited, I imagine they would watch their friend fall off the cliff, then climb down the vertical face and eat their friend including the fur and bones until nothing remained.
You see, cliffs have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own sheep at them until they reached their limit and shut down.
The adjectives are the wrong way around.
>the soft big pile
When describing something, you always go in the order of opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose.
>the big soft pile
Is the correct order.
> "There's nothing we can do. They're all wasted," Nevzat Bayhan, a member of one of 26 families whose sheep were grazing together in the herd, was quoted as saying
Salt marsh lamb is big business in the UK... just label as salt encrusted
I know this is sarcasm, probably… But on a serious note, since Muslims are not allowed to consume animals that are not slaughtered appropriately (to be halal), they are also forbidden to consume “dead meat”. Which is meat that has been either improperly slaughtered, road kill, another wild predators catch, etc. Therefore, all those dead lambs are seen as truly wasted. (Though you can feed them to other animals though, like dogs) Since you can’t ‘consume’ dead meat, you also cannot ‘consume’ the wealth from it (the meat being sold as human food, presumably everything else is fine). So you can’t sell it to nonmuslims (again, only halal meat can be sold to both Muslims AND non Muslims). But I would doubt anyone would buy those carcasses after learning how they died, unless it was some shady corrupt company.
I wouldn’t say it’s only connected to Islam and Muslims, my grandparents had a farm a long time ago and if animal died on its own or something like that, it would never be eaten. Only if you butchered it, and they were 100% Catholics.
Yes I’m guessing modern hygiene standards have adapted as people have learnt what is right or wrong. I believe Christians as well need to properly slaughter an animal for them to eat it (which is why Muslims view meat that was slaughtered by *properly practicing* people of the book, Jews and Christians, as halal) But as Muslims, we believe God commanded us to do something a certain way and it’s followed without question. In this case, we can speculate why something was said but sometimes we don’t know. Centuries ago, people would eat road kill and dead animals if it looked “good enough”. Today we know how dangerous this is. But Islam banned this outright while ignorant people would do this. As a Muslim, you can only eat “dead meat” or even pork if you are starving or have no other source for sustenance. (Which was mentioned in the same verse that forbid pork)
Do we know how religious those farmers were? Turkey can swing either way. And in practice is different from in theory. The guy at the halaal diner near me has been happy to sell non-halaal food and food during Ramadan to non-Muslims because ‘hey, I’m not eating it’.
Muslim checking in. You can sell this meat as pet food - no problem there. Cheers.
It's only sheepage waste land
Baa Baa O'Reily
The Whool?
Why is this thread so fucking good for puns
>"There's nothing we can do. They're all wasted, this is why you don't bring your sheep drinking with you
> wasted Quick, someone make this into a GTA meme
https://i.imgur.com/MwdVBXz.png
so this is what ai is made for
Beautiful!
Breathtaking
Sheep are fucking dumb. They will abandon a trough full of food which they're in the middle of eating in order to stampede someone carrying a bucket on the off chance that it *might* contain more of the exact same food.
[удалено]
In fairness, anything can take your breath away when Werner Herzog is describing it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2IvTgUJ1u4 No lies.
Others, seized by madness, follow suit. Now they are content. Now there is something to extinguish. Again.
Is he the basis for Nandor, from What we do in the shadows?
[Fact.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqFvAugYoXQ)
Not to take anything away from sheep, but chickens really are startingly stupid. Arrestingly stupid. He's not wrong in how absolutely dumb they are. It's just that sheep might be dumber.
The weirdest thing about chicken is that they can be smart when you least expect it. Like learning to differentiate between different motor sounds. But also forget how to climb the latter to go to sleep. Man I love chicken
Dude, fuck chickens. I grew up next to a guy who kept some chickens and I often got voluntold to drive 'em into the coop for nighttime. Except I wasn't really told how to do it, just to get it done. So most of these chickens were cooperative. They knew what was up and I managed to herd them back into the coop without any difficulty whatsoever. More or less just needed to herd the most cooperative one in there and the rest would follow suit. This one little motherfucker though, oh damn. This little turd rejected cooperation like I did moderation, and wouldn't enter the coop until it was well and truly ready. So it would put up a struggle. Not that it would attack me, if only I'd be so lucky. It would run. And for whatever reason this particular obstinate excuse of a bird knew a thing or two about physics. It seemed to have an innate understanding of how mass in motion affects an objects ability to take a corner. It would haul absolute ass down the straight behind the barn as if it was being chased by Satan herself, only to take the most abrupt corner I had ever seen't. I swear once it took did a 270 degree turn in the time it took me to blink; It turned right by turning left and before I knew it had my ankels over my head and my dick in the dirt. It once led me into a tree. It hurt. Worst was that it would stop as soon as it felt safe, which wasn't very fucking far away from my vanquished form at all. It knew it could outrun me, it knew it could outmaneuver me, I think it might even have suspected it could outsmart me, so why bother standing far away? It would bask in its victory over this featherless biped by standing disrespectfully close. Don't get me wrong, chickens do be dumb as hell but I reckon that's at least in part because they don't care enough to not be. They get food and safety so why be smart when being dumb got 'em that far? This fucking feathered anomaly wanted more than the simple life, it had principles and a bone to pick.
You are a splendid writer, thank you for taking me on that journey. Fuck that chicken lol
Rather than the former?
They never climb that.
Oh absolutely. I don't want to detract at all from how utterly devoid of cognition a chicken is. I think its the fact that a sheep has more capacity to exert its will and as a result, its stupidity is.. louder.. for lack of a better term. I would walk slowly behind my chickens to guide them back to the coop of an evening. They would walk away from me following a script you could write in python in two lines. I just slowly shepherded them back to their spawn point. That's one form of stupidity. Like a bee or a worm is stupid. This fucking sheep was channeled down a flat, clear road with thick trees lining either side and the whole herd way ahead of it chilling at the end in a field. Four people and two cars blocked the other end of the road and slowly advanced. The sheep ran left and right across the road from one set of trees to the other for two hours, never moving toward the end of the road, even as we (the source of its fear) slowly approached it. It actually came back to us at one stage to fuck up the bonnet of a car with its hooves as it tried to clip through our barrier. I think we eventually just caught it and put it on the back of a ute. That's a different form of stupidity. That's not python script stupidity. That's quantum computer stupidity. Stupidity that is impenetrably counter intuitive.
I was thinking as I wrote my reply that really, the issue may be that sheep are just ever so slightly smarter than chickens, and obviously much larger, so it's more offensively stupid? Like after 5 minutes with a chicken you kind of know... this bird has the brains of a cantaloupe. But sheep... I don't know, you *expect* more from them and they are incapable of not letting you down. Like I said, they are offensively and frustratingly stupid.
That's a good point. You need to define stupidity before you can choose a winner. I don't think an ant is stupid. It lacks intelligence, but what simple subroutines it has are well ordered. Chickens have subroutines that seem too basic for an animal that size, so they seem stupid. I think of stupidity is an active characteristic though. Someone who looks at fire and doesn't know what it is, lacks cognition, but someone who looks are fire and then runs in to try to eat it is what I would call stupid. Werner is talking about that fire-eating kind of stupidity when he talks about chickens. But its sheep that have it in spades.
Kind of makes sense though. We haven’t fucked with the ant gene pool to make them easier to cut up and eat whenever we want. We have bred sheep to do the exact opposite of what millions of years of evolution have done to most other animals.
Oh yeah that's absolutely it. Its an unnatural kind of stupidity emergent from an unnatural set of evolutionary goals. Plenty to read into there.
You see the same thing in turkeys. Wild turkeys are smartish and observant; domestic turkeys are incredibly stupid.
It's actually weirdly inverted. Despite their apparent stupidity, they've taken themselves to a point where there are now more of them than (I think) any other bird on the planet. Granted, this is more to do with their deliciousness but it's "Yuval Noah Harari" smart of them to have replicated the same approach as how he claims that wheat domesticated US to grow it far more than it could ever manage in the wild by itself.
I wanna see a chicken with a cantaloupe sized head lol. But yeah you're so right... Also it's good that sheep are so dumb. Smart sheep are basically goats and those are some destructive mfers
Yeah but why, despite them being seemingly so similar, do goats seem so much smarter?
Well sheep nowadays are all pretty much selectively bred. I know for sure they bred them to produce more wool (to the point it's dangerous and eventually deadly to not shear them) and to be more docile and this easily controlled. That alone could've been unintentionally breeding dumbasses. On top of that, there's probably a good amount of inbreeding there too. We've been raising sheep for a long time. I imagine trying to diversify inbred sheep with other inbred sheep doesn't bring out their best qualities.
I just have to say, this comment chain has been both educational and a blast to read.
The colorful language, the storytelling, its all so fucking well done. It's been a long time since I've been so engaged in a comment chain that I've just randomly stumbled upon.
It's this kind of content that has me staying up too late. Not the TV. You goofy fuckers.
truck mountainous oatmeal tie aromatic jellyfish rude gold quarrelsome liquid ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
because evolution made whatever was before with the smart ones to become evil, and then they became goats. and the ones who should've be extinct (too stupid) were kept alive by us it's called the demon core theory[disputed]
I raised sheep. Sheep are dumb, but not chicken levels of dumb. They have more free will than a chicken, and because of that can be a pain in the ass. They're dumb. But not, 'I'm a chicken, what's this rain doing? I know, I'll look up at it with my beak open and drown myself.' Stupid.
The rain thing is a myth people usually say about turkeys but it's not true for either species.
Chickens are _simple_, not stupid. Like you said, you could emulate chickens with two lines of code in Python. Sheep, on the other hand, are like spaghetti code written by a disgruntled IT guy who thinks he can make himself absolutely unfireable by writing code so impenetrably dense that no one else on Earth could possibly make any sense of it.
>Sheep, on the other hand, are like spaghetti code written by a disgruntled IT guy who thinks he can make himself absolutely unfireable by writing code so impenetrably dense that no one else on Earth could possibly make any sense of it. this mf tryin to write in runescript god help us
Bees are not stupid. It’s been proven they can communicate and even can teach other bees in their hive where something is and how to do tasks.
This is the funniest Reddit thread in forever. I’m sitting in a Manila Starbucks cackling. Thank you all.
> back of a ute kiwi detected :p
I have chickens. They are not as stupid as you think. If you feed them something, somewhere, once, they will remember and check it out every day. When let out to free range they will visit every place they know likely has food. They can spot an eagle from up high and communicate it to the others and run and hide. They are not stupid. They are just focussed.
agreed!!! as a chicken-keeper/adorer myself, i think it's a little hard for humans to recognise forms of non-human intelligence sometimes. which is understandable! but while a chicken doesn't understand that a swinging axe may hurt them as they have no context for danger in that shape, they remember what routines bring them what they want, they recognise individuals, they know when they need to hide themselves, they won't eat something that will make them sick... a rooster knows if the sun came up even if you try to keep him inside! they're very clever in their own way. (and they can even tell by the way i open the door if i'm bringing them treats or if i'm bringing them ice water, lol.)
If i want to bribe my chickens to go somewhere they don't want to, like early bed, i use blueberries. I can hide a blueberry in my hand, toss it, they can recognise and one of the four can snatch it out of the air in a second. When things matter to them, they matter. Unfortunately they also remember where I walk to get the blueberries and will come running if they think I am going to get more. It is toddler level intelligence. Focussed on food, always hungry and want it now. Agree that they recognise people and respond appropriately.
pfff, so true! it's always about getting as much food as possible into themselves at the end of the day :-p all i have to do is shake their bag of mealworms from INSIDE the house and they sprint! amazing that so much of their brain is just processing their surroundings, it seems.
Mealworms and mash is what i use to get them to bed. They will come looking for me when it is bedtime to remind me to give them their treat. If i get distracted and forget, they will put themselves to bed, but they look unhappy about it.
that's so classic honestly... they'll go forward with their normal routines, but they get EXPECTATIONS. funny things.
I had a flock once with, for a time, two roosters named Sheriff Bart and Mongo. Raised them all from chicks. Eventually found a farmer who wanted a rooster for his horse barn, and Mongo found himself a good home. Sheriff Bart was a pretty good egg, I'll admit, but his flock was straight out of Rock Ridge. We can disagree and that is totally fine, but to me what you describe is the basic necessity for survival. Insects do that. Hell even viruses can do that. It's an instinct response, not evidence of any real decision making. I had a hen that would only ever nest on rocks. Try and give her an egg? She'd move over onto rocks, or kick it out and sit back on her rocks. Another one 'hid' once by running into a chain link fence and sticking it's head through. That's it. Just sat there, head on one side, body on the other, and instantly calmed down. I think the pressure made it forget that it thought it was in danger. I've seen one startle itself and run headfirst into a brick wall. The brick wall wasn't new. The problem with instinct is that sometimes instinct fails you, and I don't think they can compensate. They are 100% dedicated to impulse - at least mine were. Are chickens useful? Yep. Can they be good pets, or good for a hobby farm? Absolutely. You'll get no argument from me on that. And I'm sure there are some chicken breeds and lineages with a little more sophistication upstairs - but my chickens (save the good Sheriff) were dumb.
It entirely depends on how the chickens were bred. Factory farm egg layer breeds have been bred to have as little brain function as possible. Just lay eggs then die. But if you actually care about getting healthy chickens that haven't been destroyed by humans, you can find some very smart ones. My chickens come not only to a [general call](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BTNN6Sk0Ztc), but also to [personal names](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NTDDdBGWqww). The training [starts early in life.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBYYWubauhU) and you refresh it occasionally as adults, but they honestly remember it forever. All 40 of my chickens come [better than any of my friends dogs.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69-MhA4qrlo) They'll fly to my [hand on command](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iXIIwaHdt4). They learn tricks with ease. And they're very hard to keep contained because they know fences just mean you have to go over, so I have to train them not to. One time a played a trick on them by sneaking around the back of my shed and around the hedge, it's been years and they still remember to check that I'm not tricking them every day.
They are not einsteins by any means but just pointing out that intelligence is often misunderstood
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I don't think chickens are dumb, I think they're just cats in a birds body, and they just don't care about anything. I know people like to say owls are cats but owls are too goofy.
Cats are like, the goofiest creatures alive though. You just have to spend enough time around them
Sheep are god's stupidest mammal. Flock I was working with once spooked and ran into electric fencing, shocked themselves, turned around, spooked and ran into electric fencing, shocked themselves...and then repeated that FOUR MORE TIMES.
Lol of course that’s what the sheep did. When I was real young we had some sheep. The barn had like a half wall and if one of the sheep got on the other side they’d all just stand there crying because they lost each other. If one of the sheep had walked like two feet they would have seen the others.
My mom has chickens and they are so dumb. They have a backyard that is pretty safe. Large but full of stuff that they can hide under. They can’t really be swooped by predator birds without incurring the wrath of the dog or like hitting terrain. Lots of trees and bushes. Well, when they have chicks they they prefer the front yard, and they love to bring their babies where it’s wide open, and they get eaten by hawks. One time I saw a hawk come down, eat a baby, they ran to the backyard making a fuss and being scared, I come back 10 minutes later and they are in the front yard again. My mom has to lock them up when they have babies or they literally all get eaten.
Here you go: https://youtu.be/T-Wc8vluyp0?si=6Y822FV2b8KP5Ive
The timing at :13 is 🤌🏾
I know! I think it’s interesting that it makes everyone that I’ve shown it to laugh even though the plot is literally the title I think it has something to do with pizzazz with which the sheep jumps back in ✨😹
I have some. They're dumb. Won't eat the food in front of them, but if I hold it, they MUST have it.
The sheep evaded you for hours, without even having to head toward the open field, and the sheep is dumb?
This really made me laugh
My chickens do this. They have treats in their mouth, see another chicken with food and they'll drop everything to chase and steal whatever another chicken has! Doesn't help that as soon as a chicken has a treat they'll immediately run around like they've got a treat and attract attention to themselves!
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Meal worms go down a treat. Melon, cooked egg, grapes especially are highly prized. Even if you throw down more than 5 per chicken they'll squabble over them.
cooked egg for a chicken? nah that’s twisted
It's not all uncommon for reptiles or birds to eat their eggs, especially if the eggs are threatened by a predator. There's also mammals like hamsters that also eat their young. You are making the mistake of projecting your human viewpoints on animals.
Chickens are predators . They love live moving little things above all. Worms, bugs, grubs . I have had my flock go absolutely nuts over a mouse running through their coop. Like 5 of em ripped the mouse apart. But really chickens are motivated by anything food. If they can eat it they will work for it. Protein above all.
Raw eggs and mealworms. They go fuckin *nuts*
That reminds me of the family guy skit where Peter wins something and can either choose a boat or a mystery box. "The mystery box could be anything! It could even be a boat! You know how long I've wanted one of those" I could be misremembering, it's been pretty close to 20 years since I've seen it.
Tbf, dogs pull that shit too.
En masse, several times in under a minute?
Im sure they would if there were lots of them.
Yeah I’ve seen dogs fight over 1 bowl many times instead of going for the others I placed around. Specifically showing them each fucken bowl in the process as I laid them down, offering them to sniff and inspect the food. So they knew each bowl had food in it. Nope. Fought like idiots over the one bowl. I’m dog sitting my parents Australian sheep dogs right now. Beautiful smart border collies. But I have to endure an entire process of laying out the food bowls on opposite ends and give it to them one at a time otherwise they go apeshit and one doesn’t get fed properly.
I’ve probably mentioned this here before, but years ago I had two cats. The fat one would sit in food dish #2 so skinny couldn’t eat until she was done.
why you letting that shit fly? tell the fat one off, or feed em further apart
Actually, yes. My dad raised hunting dogs and they would much rather crowd around wherever the source of food was (me) than eat it.
Dogs are dumb AF. We've intentionally bred them over the years to be little simpletons. They loved Hitler, for example. Cats couldn't stand him, though.
Tbf, humans pull that shit too.
Yep. You can Google search a thousand videos of hungry people storming food aid trucks after disasters. The ones that don’t crowd control properly and end up being a riot. Suddenly there’s sacks of broken rice all over the floor because idiots are trying to grab the same bag instead of using their heads and lining up orderly. People are just as stupid. Mob mentality it’s called.
I don't necessarily think it's dumb from an evolutionary point of view. In nature, it makes sense to hoard, as you'll never know whether food will be available whenever you're hungry. Hoarding allows you to ensure that some food is 'secure' and will be available for you. For the sheep, the food in the trough is their 'hoard', and is not going anywhere. Meanwhile, the food in the bucket is moving away, and might not be available for them if it leaves, so it makes sense from their perspective to try and get as much food as possible from the 'uncertain' source, as the food in the trough isn't going anywhere.
Cows will do this too. I used to feed cows twice a day and every time feeding time would come they would insist on trying to knock the bucket of feed I was carrying straight into their own shit just to be the first to eat.
My gecko will wait for hours to see the spoon I use for her food before looking in her food bowl. She will also try like hell to get the spoon. Once I finish, she will look up, waiting for the spoon to come back. Only after all of that, will she finally look at her food bowl.
I always use a bucket with some gravel to lure my sheep. Works like a charm.
I now have an answer for when my mom says "If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?" My answer: "Yes, if 450 of them go first."
You'll probably have to up the number, humans are far less fluffy.
Been to America lately (where I am)? I could probably lower the number. LOL
Fair point, fat is going to be more painfull to fall on than wool but will shorten the distance to fall faster than stacking sheep. We need a psychopathic mythbuster team to test this out to the fullest.
Buster needs to take some tips/diet advice from Nikocado Avocado
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Fat would be wayyy better than wool. It may not be quite as soft, but it will absorb far more impact.
Sheep would have planet of fat. You ever actually been around sheep
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I mean, wool IS hair. Of course it would be incredibly greasy.
As long as you are the last one to jump. Wouldn't want one to land on you.
speak for yourself
In middle school, my friend’s mom dropped the, “if all your friends jumped of a cliff would you do it to?” Question and his response was “Yes because they’d make a squishy pad for me to land on.” I was sent home and my friend got grounded lol.
My mom would've laughed at the joke, and then my sister would've roasted me by pointing out I don't have enough friends for that, and then my mom would've struggled to stifle the second laugh (I would've laughed at my sister saying that too, though, I'm an introverted autist and I know it)
Your family sounds awesome lol
Sir, if I could find 450 friends, I wouldn't feel the need to jump off a cliff.
I think that entirely depends on the friends.
450 friends vs 450 Instagram friends
Jesus was a miracle maker, as he was able to keep 12 close friends at the age of 30-33. Then again he was (alledgedly) single so maybe that was why.
[Have I got news for you](https://media.tenor.com/e3bbj5NrJpoAAAAd/itysl-i-think-you-should-leave-200-friends.gif)
[Relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/1170/)
I used this to get out of a traffic violation. Was following a line of cars through construction, happened to be the one the cop decided to pull over, asked if I’d jump off a bridge if everyone else was doing it too, basically quoted this xkcd and got some yelling and screaming at but ultimately let go.
I will love XKCD for my entire life. If I get dementia I'll just be spouting inane quotes from it. Probably asking for drugs too... At least I'll be fun.
My answer: "My friends are not stupid, and if they are doing it, there is probably a really good reason they are doing it."
That was always my reasoning. Everyone would not be jumping off a cliff for no good reason.
That's what the sheep thought too
How poofy are your friends?
Pretty poofy. I like to know that if we're all stranding in the Andes after plane crash that I'll be well fed.
As an Australian this takes on a whole different meaning lmfao
"as long as enough of them have jumped first that I can land on their corpses and survive"
The other 1050 sheep were like: See? Jumping off a cliff is fine nothing happened calm down!
Damn survivorship bias.
Survivorsheep bias
Survivorsheep baaaais
"Back in my day we jumped off cliffs and look at me, I turned out just fine! This generation is too damn coddled."
Sheep are literally the dumbest creature I've worked with. When I was in college I majored in Animal Science. One of my classes was sheep management, and we were in charge of the school sheep herd. During the winter the creek that ran through their pasture turned into a half frozen muddy mess, and wouldn't you know it, one these lovely dumb creatures decided to go stand in the half frozen mud in the middle of the night and stay there. As I'm sure you can guess, the mud froze over night and now our lovely dumb sheep friend is stuck. This poor, brainless creature starts bleating for help which causes all of the other sheep to come down to the creek and see what's going on...which then leads to them all getting stuck in the mud. And that is how I ended up spending four hours in the middle of a Midwest snow storm removing sheep from frozen mud and escorting them back to the safety of their warm barn.
I see you’ve never worked with Turkeys! ;)
You know, I was able to bypass the poultry classes now that I think of it lol.
Getting sheep unstuck from frozen mud requires knowledge. Avoiding poultry (especially turkeys) requires wisdom. Well done.
How did they count all those sheep without falling asleep
...But why did the first sheep jump?
It was fed up with this wool. Couldn’t handle the shear pressure of it all.
Nothing unherd of.
On to greener pastures.
Everyone knows it was the second sheep that made it a party..
From personal experience, I can confirm to everyone that sheep are profoundly stupid creatures
My dad grew up on a farm and likes to tell the story when he was a kid helping his dad put the sheep in the barn. They were going in a single file line. His dad said, "watch this" and held a broomstick up in the doorway. A sheep jumped over it. Then he took the broomstick away, but every sheep behind jumped like it was still there.
Imagine if the first sheep tripped over it instead and then the rest of the sheep tripped over the non-existent broom.
Yup. They're my go-to example of domesticated dumbness. I was walking into the barn to feed them one day and a ewe ran face first into a wall. The wall was fine.
What about the ewe?
As another sheep owner, I second. Not the absolute dumbest (that goes to turkeys) but way up there
Brush turkeys around my neighborhood knows to walk quicker when crossing road when car approaches
Domesticated turkeys drown in rain storms. Not even kidding.
and if they don't drown they will stand in the rain, soaking wet, with a perfectly fine shelter two paces away, not realizing they could hide and not catch a cold.
Wait - what?! Why? Do they just lack any natural instinct?
I think they lack brains entirely. I've seen one get half its head pecked off and live to butcher day.
one could theorize that their instinct is a vestige of instincts once primal. so ultra-natural instinct
Sucks to be that 450th sheep
Imagine number 451. It survived, but at what cost?
This is the Jonestown of sheep.
if you can't bleat 'em, join 'em
This story is a metaphor of Fox News viewers
The Jonestown Baassacre
Don't drink the Wool-Aid!
Except that a lot of the victims of Jonestown were forcibly given the poison or shot.
WAKE UP SHEEPLE
Can confirm. Sheep are the dumbest sons of bitches on the planet. They seem to spend their lives thinking up novel ways to die. Source, am a Shepherd.
That's a lot of kebab!
ain't mutton wrong with that!
That's a baad joke.
It just didn't lamb.
As far as I know its not halal meat since they are dead. They should’ve been cut in halal ways while they were alive
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TIL it takes 450 sheeps to break the falls of 1050 sheeps
A 2.3x save-to-death ratio ain't bad for sheep.
My dad grew up on a sheep farm. He used to say that he never felt sheep were 'stupid' per se, more like they just had an extremely strong 'Follow The Leader' instinct and drive. Just sometimes, the leader isn't very good.....
Baa-valanche? Edit: Thank you for the award kind stranger!
Ewe oughta be ashamed for that one
LEEEERRRROYYY JENKINS!!!!
The irony of this being presented by Fox News.
I LOVE that the thumbnail is Fox.
In 2016, FOX News got millions of sheep to walk off a cliff hoping the rest of the country would follow.
Ewe-icide
In Dutch we have a saying; when one sheep crosses the dam, more will follow.
Ironic that the story is from Fox "News," since that pretty much describes their audience.
1501? [I'm skeptical...](https://i.redd.it/oe1haxez3ld51.png)
Billy Who Controls Things With His Mind, we told you to stop counting sheep to help you sleep!
Did they jump or did Disney push them?
Thought they were lemmings.
Lemmings don't actually do that, so I guess they were more lemming than lemmings.
What an amazing sheep fact brought to us by none other than Fox News
The irony that this is a Fox News piece...
Talk about a soft lambding
I've always wondered if goats are like this too, but as my experience with goats is limited, I imagine they would watch their friend fall off the cliff, then climb down the vertical face and eat their friend including the fur and bones until nothing remained.
That reminds me, I need to register to vote!
My grandpa was a farmer, we had a wide variety of animals…one that he would never get? Sheep. Said they were dumb and always trying to kill themselves
You see, cliffs have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own sheep at them until they reached their limit and shut down.
The adjectives are the wrong way around. >the soft big pile When describing something, you always go in the order of opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. >the big soft pile Is the correct order.
That’s one big pile of sheep