2 weeks ago, Cambridge University Researchers announced that
sheep are able to recognise human faces.
To prove this point, eight female Welsh Mountain
The researchers say it “might be interesting in the
future to investigate whether sheep can identify different expressions on human
faces” and that this work “might even have implications for learning about
neurodegenerative diseases, such as Huntington’s and Parkinson’s”. I have to
confess that I was so bored at this point that I didn’t even bother to research
as to why this study would have any bearing on Huntington’s and Parkinson’s
disease.
How on earth did Cambridge
University
I could have told them that sheep can tell one human from
another with a bit of practice. In fact, if you were to send someone into their
field with a feed bag, they would come running without even checking to see if
they recognised the face or not.
A few years ago in Horse and hound magazine there was an
article about an equine research project in America . A group of persons
obviously had access to some kind of funding and had 12 pure bred Arab horses
in their yard. They exercised all 12 in exactly the same way, for the same length
of time each day. And every day after the horses had been exercised, 6 of them
went through a set of stretching exercises.
You will never believe what they discovered after 4 weeks of
this regime.
They discovered that the 6 horses that had been doing the
stretching after their work had only gone and built up more muscle that their
non-stretching counterparts.
If I asked Britney (Not her real name) what she thought the
outcome would be after this 4 week long bonkers study, I’m 105% certain that
even she would have guessed the end result.
When I go outside to my stable at stupid o’ clock in the
morning and am wearing my high visibility jacket that I ride in, my horse
stands still and looks at me. If I venture outside into the gloom wearing my
other scruffy coat that is dark in colour and smells faintly horsey, my horse
begins to chew and moves across the stable to his feed manger. And why is this?
Is Wet Dishcloth Horse super intelligent? No. Wet Dishcloth horse knows that if
I don’t have my riding jacket on, he is going to get his breakfast as we are
not going to cavort around the countryside in the dark.
This made me wonder what kind of research I could get
funding for. What about some form of remuneration to discover if clothing fades
and goes bobbly the more times you wash it? Or I could research how fat I will get
if I lie on the sofa every day for a month, eating chocolates and watching
daytime television.
The possibilities are endless. I could see how full of
rubbish my car becomes if I don’t ever clean it out, how full of ash the log
burner gets if I burn 2 baskets of logs every day and how many strange looks I
get from my Mummy friends if I do the school run in my pyjamas.
I could check how effective Northumbria Police are by seeing
how many times I get arrested for shoplifting and if I drive my car without a
valid MOT I would find out if the DVLA are keeping their databases up to date.
I could park on double yellow lines to see if the bastard Traffic
Warden is still the Son of Satan and I could check if Britney’s school is
dealing with truanting children correctly by keeping her off school for 2 days
every week.
How do I apply for funding for my research? Who do I write
to?
The article about the celebrity-recognising-Sheep was on the
BBC website and handily there was a link to the Royal Society for Open Science.
I actually started to read about how chickens can hear
better if they open their beaks. I was a bit horrified to hear that they had
been frozen prior to this experiment and then I realised that they were already
dead. But as they had been supplied for the trial by a chicken farm down the
road, they hadn’t been killed just for the sake of the experiment, but their
plump bodies had already been turned into chicken nuggets ensuring that there
was no waste. I also read about the long term effects of outdoor aesthetic
lights had on bats in churches. Yes, you’ll never believe it, but enormous
spotlights illuminating the outside of a church have a detrimental effect on
bats. Who would have thought it? A creature that comes out at dusk being put off
by bright lights. Truly unbelievable.
I also read about whether dogs are red-green colour blind. The
scientists in this research showed them pictures of cats in different colours
to reach a conclusion. What if several of the dog guinea pigs in question liked
cats? They might have a completely false reading and the whole thing should be
null and void.
One study that was total and utter bollocks was Why do horseflies need polarization vision
for host detection? Polarization helps tabanid flies to select sunlit dark host
animals from the dark patches of the visual environment
Despite the fact that I didn’t even understand the title, I
know this to be rubbish because horseflies are evil and will bite absolutely
anything. I once got bitten on the back of my hand when I was sitting on a dark
brown horse and the next day my hand looked as though it had been inflated with
a bicycle pump.
Another study that caught my eye was Living with own or husband's mother in the household is associated with
lower number of children: a cross-cultural analysis.
I could have told them that. Surely living with your Mother
of Mother in Law could be classed as the best contraceptive known to man. (Or
woman.)
So after trawling the website of the Royal Society for Open
Science I lost all hope that I would secure funding for any of my studies.
Clearly, every single mad and crazy type of research has
already been undertaken.
Darn it.
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