Domestic sheep
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| Domestic sheep | |||||||||||||||||
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| A research flock at US Sheep Experiment Station near Dubois, Idaho | |||||||||||||||||
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Domesticated
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| Ovis aries Linnaeus, 1758 |
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A domestic sheep (Ovis aries) is a wooly four legged animal. Female sheep are called ewes. Male sheep are called rams. Babies are called lambs.
Sheep follow others "blindly" (i.e. without thinking). This is why people are sometimes called sheep. It means that a person follows a group of people. This can be because they trust the group. Or it can be because they are not thinking for themself. This can be good if the group leads to something positive (like a field of grass to eat). Sometimes, though, the group goes somewhere that is not good, like a place that has no food.
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[change] Flocks
A group of sheep is called a flock. Sheep follow each other in basically the same way all the time, so there are special names for the different roles sheep play in a flock. The sheep that is farthest away from the others is called the outlier, a word that is also used in statistics. This sheep is willing to go out farther away from the safety of the flock to graze, but takes a chance that a predator like a wolf will attack it first, because it is alone. Another sheep, the bellwether, which never goes first but always follows an outlier, is the one that signals to the others that it is safe to go that way. When it moves, the others will also move. Tendency to be outliers or to be bellwethers, or stick in the middle of the flock, seems to stay with a sheep its whole life. There might be genes that make them repeat this role behaviour.
[change] Dolly the Sheep
Probably the most famous sheep was Dolly the Sheep. She was named after Dolly Parton, and was the first large mammal clone. She did not live as long as a regular sheep, because clones have health problems. This is only known because of Dolly. She had sisters from the same DNA, but they did not look the same. This proved that environment has more to do with the way a sheep looks than heredity. This too is known only because of Dolly and her sisters. Dolly advanced science and scientists are very grateful to her.
[change] Fat-tailed sheep
These sheep are so named because they can store large amounts of fat in the tail and the region of the rump. They are kept mainly because they make more milk than other types of sheep; but their wool is rough and long, and is mostly used for making carpets. Fat-tailed sheep are found mainly in the very dry parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, and they represent about 25 percent of the sheep in the world. The major breeds are the Awassi, Bakhtiari, Karakul, Ghashghai, and Kermani. Another breed of fat tailed sheep is the beady it can get radged easily while driving and is almost bald.
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