I scored a mighty coup this evening. I was at the local food store with D&L, and asked the lady in the produce department if she had any scraps they were going to throw away.
“Yes!” she said, with much more enthusiasm than I’d expected. She disappeared into the back, and returned quickly with a big box filled to overflowing with what appeared to be perfectly good greenstuff.
(In explanation for this bounty, it turns out I’m now in competition with a lady who raises rabbits but doesn’t always show up when she promised. This annoys the people in the Produce section.)
Anyway, it looked like a box full of cabbage leaves until I got it home and dug around in it, and there was all sorts of stuff including several ears of almost-perfectly-good corn. So I sorted through it (a couple of ears made my own supper) and brought two ears into the chicken yard. I peeled them back and tossed them in, and the chickens reacted with alarm. They’d rarely seen anything so horrible. Surely they would all die.
This was amusing, so I stayed and watched for a while. One pecked at a husk, but didn’t find it convincing food. Therefore it was a threat to be avoided at all costs.
Finally I picked up one of the ears and shaved off several kernels on the board that holds their feed and water. This looked more like food to them. They tried it dubiously, then went completely nuts.
I came back later and found two very bare corn cobs.
Comedy.
So, like some of my neighbors, they are capable of some level of learning. Now you don’t have to shear the corn off the cob in order to entice ’em to eat it. Next thing you know, there’ll be a clucker eyeing your ear of corn at the supper table asking “You gonna eat all that?”
In my younger (and neither more nor less foolish) days, I used to follow the common wisdom that sheep are stupid.
Big mistake – there isn’t a single bit of behaviour which can’t be instantly explained by “stupid”
I’m increasingly coming to the opinion that they’re not stupid at all, but pretty bright, and very good at passive aggression.
I’m also coming to the conclusion that dismissing “stupid” as an explanation was itself a particularly stupid move – I now waste endless hours fruitlessly trying to work out what is going on in their ugly smelly little heads, in the vain hope of being able to save a little time and effort by doing my part better.
The sheep are far too bright and way too good at passive aggression to let me get away with that.