Please explain sheep and any other animal really, that can become “cast” – isn’t falling down just a normal part of life? How is it that they can’t get back up themselves and will die from what I think of as a basic fact of life?
In: Biology
Wild sheep don’t have that problem. Humans bred domestic sheep to be the way they are, which is good at producing wool and meat and not much else. We made this problem in them.
The sheep you get in the field today are engineered by thousands of years of selective breeding to make lots of wool. They aren’t the wild version. So they require humans to take care of them. They would not survive in the wild.
You gotta remember, domesticated sheep aren’t the same as natural sheep. They are tended to by humans, and humans intentionally bred them for maximum fleece size over centuries. Humans threw Darwinism away and played it ourselves with out own rules. Rather than nature selecting for survival, we selected for producing wool.
Hell, falling over killing a sheep? There are stories about sheep escaping and expected to die because, with their massive fleece and not shedding it properly, they should die from overheating or just be an easy target for predators. And then they’re found and we’re surprised they’re still alive. And then someone shears them and the fleece is twice as big as the animal under it.
They is what we’ve done to sheep. And it’s not the only animal we’ve, uhh, “altered” in a similar way.
Sheep haven’t evolved to right themselves because domesticated sheep in their current form have been bred by farmers. They are not in a form which exists in the wild, and sheep farmers have always been there to flip them over if they become stuck. An animal which would need to live on its own without human intervention would most likely be able to turn itself over, but sheep are not that.
People seem to incorrectly assume evolution will remove inconveniences. It doesn’t.
As long as sheep can reproduce plenty theres no reason for them to evolve.
Others have already mentioned selective breeding, but it should also be noted that a sheep getting cast is still a pretty unusual occurrence, and happens for a lot of the same reasons that a human might fall down and be unable to get back up – injury, heavy pregnancy, elderly or infirm, trapped by heavy clothing, caught in a hole… Most sheep never get cast, and the repeat offenders probably have some underlying cause. Accidents happen, and some individuals aren’t able to recover without help. That’s not really a species-dependent thing.
They did, and then humans undermined it by breeding them for size and docility and other features.
This is the same reason food chickens can’t breed by themselves anymore because we’ve bred them for larger breasts which prevents them from being able to mate. The same for sheep, we’ve bred them to have such massive coats that when they fall on their backs their coats prevent them from being able to roll over.
So what about turtles? Many of them are unable to right themselves
Farmed sheep are unatural aboninations forcibly bred to develop traits which can be exploited.
Why would you bother giving a sheep a better chance of survival when you intend to kill it anyway?
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