violent-darts:

inflagrante-delicatessen:

gallusrostromegalus:

0somethingcool0:

kayla-bird:

surfcommiesmustdie:

nevergonnawalkpastafez:

surfcommiesmustdie:

rose-on-the-mountain:

drtanner:

thischick25:

tardishobo:

IM LAUGIHNG HARDER THAN EVER RIGHT THIS SECOND

Reblogging this again because Chris just made me realize that sheep are so stupid that I can’t even think like them:

These sheep? They are actually running away from the car.

They are so stupid that they’re following each other in a circle around the thing they are running from.

SHEEPNADO

when your group cohesion is set higher than your flee response distance.

Moshpit

This is actually called a sheep cyclone and it happens because sheep don’t have a hierarchy. In most herds, whichever animal is the leader will sense danger and take off running. The rest of the herd takes it’s cues from the leader and follows. Sheep, on the other hand, don’t have a leader. If the flock runs, they run, and they follow whatever fluffy tail happens to be in front of them. Usually, this works out fine for the sheep. Occasionally, however, the sheep in the front starts following the fluffy tail of the sheep in the back so the whole flock ends up running in circles, going nowhere fast.

sheeps are morons lmao

is this what the doggos are for

@gallusrostromegalus

This is, to my understanding, excactly WHY we have both herding and livestock guardian dogs.  Sheep are… really amazingly dumb most of the time.  

Then, once in a while, you get one sheep that’s Entirely Too Cunning and that’s when all hell breaks loose.

…that sounds like a horror story

I have been informed by those who study domestic animal behaviour that it’s not so much that they’re stupid with the occasional intelligent one, as that their priorities are so different from our priorities – in part because we did things like deliberately breed dominant traits out of them over thousands of years – that you have to change how you think about how they work at all. 

The one, major, overwhelming priority of sheep: Stay With The Herd. This is why you get sheepnados: every single sheep is doing his or her devoted best to stay with the herd. So the sheep runs out of the way … .to the rest of the herd. At which point the other sheep follow it and … .you get sheepnado. 

The sheepnado continues in part because there’s nothing to stop it: the car doesn’t actually present a clear and present threat (none of the sheep have been hurt), and there’s no farmer or dog to take that lead position and give them direction. It’s ore or less succeeding at what it needs to, which is that no sheep are being run down by the car, but, THE HERD IS STAYING TOGETHER. 

If you want to see how smart a sheep gets, take it away from the herd. 

(And if you think about this, it makes perfect sense: “stay with the herd” has HUGE SELECTION PRESSURE on it for domestic sheep. Domestic sheep who stray, die without reproducing. Domestic sheep that get stroppy with the farmer or interfere with the leadership of farmer and his dogs … die, usually without reproducing. Domestic sheep that Stay With The Herd? Usually live and reproduce. The herd becomes ALL IMPORTANT. It’s not that they don’t know they’re running in circles, it’s that running in circles achieves The Goal.

It’s not that sheep have no survival instincts: it’s that we as a species have actually redirected their survival instincts in one overwhelming direction, and evolution is a messy kludge.) 

And then if you want to give yourself a head-trip, combine this with those Humans Are Weird SF posts and start wondering what kind of behaviours WE have that could look, to an alien with a very different priority set, as stupid as sheepnado.