Now that I spend much of my time with sheep, people seem to tell me about all the funny behaviors they’ve heard about and ask me if I’ve experienced them.  I’ve disappointed a lot of folks who really want to believe in the sheep with the LEDs (yeah, it’s fake…).  So when someone mentioned that sheep sometimes form a scrum with their heads in the center to make shade for themselves, I was duly skeptical; it seemed like a pointless exercise, and natural selection is very unforgiving of pointlessness.

shade scrum-1026

But chalk it up to the circular logic of behavioral evolution:  if they do it, it must work.  And why does it work? Because they do it.  I still maintain that it can’t really be cooler in there with all those sheep breathing on each other, but I guess I wouldn’t know.