Normal Behaviour

We know what constitutes sheep’s normal behaviour. Essentially, it is to be: at outdoor pasture; in circumstances that are quiet and relaxed; with appropriate lengths of time to eat, ruminate, rest and sleep; with opportunity and surroundings for mating, breeding, and infant-nurturing, in tune with natural cycle. A sheep needs to be with other sheep.

Through humans’ endeavour to educate each other about sheep, and through their use of sheep entertainingly in that educating process, or by humans’ use of sheep to entertain as reason in itself, can come disruption, distortion and alteration to what is sheep’s normal behaviour.

Sheep having a right to express normal behaviour has quite a long heritage, its roots being in the 1965 Brambell Report which led to the Five Freedoms which the Farm Animal Welfare Advisory Council articulated in 1979. One of the Freedoms was ‘Freedom to express normal behaviour’. Then came in 1994 the Five Domains Model for animal welfare of David J Mellor and Dr Cam Reid. (The Five Domains Model was last updated in 2020). Domain 4 is ‘Behaviour’. Mellor, in his comment on Figure 1 in his 2017 paper ‘Operational Details of the Five Domains Model and Its Key Applications to the Assessment and Management of Animal Welfare’ in Animals, gives this useful information, ‘Note that an animal exercises “agency” (Domain 4: “Behaviour”) when it engages in voluntary, self-generated and goal-directed behaviours [44.45].’ So, from this, an interpretation of what represents the normal behaviour of a sheep can be: the behaviour which a sheep, on its own initiative, decides to do, for its own objective.  

At the National Trust’s Wimpole Home Farm that the sheep and lambs are able to behave in their normal way is seen as the supremely important thing. Visitors are not allowed to feed sheep and lambs. At lambing time, only mother’s milk is given to lambs (unless for some reason the mother cannot feed a lamb, in which instance the lamb will be bottle fed by a member of the staff). Visitors are kept a distance away, so that ewes and lambs can behave normally without disturbance. When the lambs are strong enough, they and their mothers are transferred to the pasture of the Wimpole Estate. 

The approach at Wimpole Home Farm contrasts markedly with some other places which have visitors. At certain of these latter, visitors can feed lambs. And this could mean that the lambs remain indoors for quite long, rather than them experiencing the outdoors quite soon after being born as would be usual. (And they, together with some sheep to whom visitors can feed purchased-food indoors, may be kept inside at a time when normally sheep would be outside consuming luxuriant and nutritious pasture.) There is a natural season for lambing. The Big Sheep Farm & Theme Park boasts ‘we lamb throughout the year’. 

There can be other and worse ‘departures from norm’. Sheep ‘dancing’, racing, doing anything on a stage or in an auditorium, is not sheep expressing their normal behaviour. They are being trained to be performers; they are being treated in a commensurate way to circus animals and dancing bears. The scene is that from an age of less enlightenment. Not only are the sheep not displaying normal behaviour, they are being used in a way which denigrates them and which insults, and is against, their true nature.

A threat to the ability of sheep to express normal behaviour can come from the type of environment into which they are put. Land which sheep are made to occupy, or their accommodation of other kind, may not be appropriate or large enough to permit the sheep to behave in usual manner. City farms whose territory may be small - due to inability to obtain enough urban space etc - are a category which may be not be giving sheep as much or as good pasture or accommodation as sheep need for their well-being or to act normally. 

So, the overall concerning matter is this. Some of what humans require sheep to do is not sheep’s normal behaviour and/or does not allow sheep to express their normal behaviour.