Extracts from the article, Sheep do have opinions, by Vinciane Despret on the work of Thelma Rowell.
The twenty-third bowl is part of a device that, in Bruno Latour's tems, should give all the chances to the sheep: It should allow them to be more interesting.
The way we study primates is rather different from the way classical ethology was carried out, with long-term research, individual-based studies looking for relationships, looking for ways of communication.
Interesting research is research on the conditions that make something interesting.
Long-lasting relations between mothers and daughters were so obvious that she wanted to find out in which situations these relations were not maintained. She discovered that this was usually the case when the daughters had their own lambs. Rowell thus inverted the question: instead of, "Are ewes capable of maintaining bonds with their daughters?" she asked "in which particular circumstances do they not do so?"
our results show that such-an-such a variable determines such-and-such an event, and its absence leads to its disappearance. In Rowell's work this question rises from a downstream position to an upstream one, loses its status as a variable and becomes a condition:
"in which conditions are we most likely to be able to make visible that which hitherto could not exist?"
"What are the conditions that sheep require to expand their repertoire of behaviors?"
"How are we going to afford them the opportunity to give us the chance to talk differently about them?"
The question here is which of these two hypotheses is the most interesting: that of an animal strictly determined by its hormones and by hierarchical rules, fighting blindly for problems of competition, or that of an animal articulating its body to other bodies, in a spirit of both competition and coordination to invent a solution to several problems? this is certainly a political choice ... it is political in the sense of posing the problem of the collective that we form: Do we prefer living with predictable sheep of with sheep that surprise us and that add other definitions to what 'being social' means? .. I think the cooperation is much more interesting. And this is the thing that makes the social living animals different and interesting, which we all agree that they are.
Today these methods are criticized because most of them are criticized because most of them accentuate competition among animals, which are often not provided with enough resources compared to their numbers. Consequently, that which was designed to make visible not only restricts the repertoire of animals observed but also considerably disrupts the way in which they organize themselves.
The twenty-third bowl is meaningful in relation to this problem. it is intended not only to avoid disrupting relations but also, above all, to expand the repertoire of hypotheses and questions proposed to the sheep.
The idea is not to prevent them from entering into competition around the supply of food; it is to leave them the choice of doing so, to ensure that competition is not the only possible response to a proposition. If the sheep chooses competition, the hypothesis of scarcity of a resource can no longer account for their behavior. It is then necessary to conceive of other, more complicated explanations and to ask the sheep other questions on their social behavior. To be sure, there is competition, but expanding the repertoire of possible motives allows far more sophisticated explanations.
The role of this ethology is legible in this emblematic twenty-third bowl: it is responsible for inventing, with the generosity of intelligence, polite ways of entering into relationships with non-humans.
