Eight animals were able to pick out Jake Gyllenhaal, Emma
Watson and Barack Obama 80% of the time.
Although it has long been known that sheep are able to recognise the faces of their human handlers, scientists have now shown the farm animals can be trained to recognise images of famous people.
Professor Jenny Morton, the lead scientist in the Cambridge
University study, said it showed sheep have face-recognition abilities
comparable with those of humans or monkeys.
Her team trained eight sheep to recognise the faces of four
celebrities - journalist Fiona Bruce, actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Emma Watson,
and former US president Barack Obama.
In the tests, each animal was shown two faces, one of which
was the target celebrity, and given an award of a cereal pellet if it
approached the correct image.
They were then put in a pen and tested on whether they recognised the celebrities without the cereal rewards - and eight times out of ten they did.
It was also discovered that the sheep distinguished
photographs of their handlers - people that the animals spend two hours a day
in the company of - ahead of those of celebrities. They picked the real-life
familiar faces over famous people seven times out of ten.
The sheep's facial recognition abilities could be used to
investigate Huntington's disease, which can cause people to lose those very
abilities, scientists said.
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