On Animals That Know Things

Part One:

Guinea Pigs are afraid of aeroplanes. This is possibly because if you are a Guinea Pig an aeroplane looks very much like a Condor and a Condor to a Guinea Pig is a very scary thing indeed, owing in part to its tendency to be rather partial to Guinea Pig meat and in part to it's expert flying ability.

My Mum's Guinea Pigs have never met a Condor, nor lived in a place that Condors frequent. But if an aeroplane flies overhead or the shadow of a thing passes over their heads they run for cover. How do they know to do that? Is there a gene in Guinea Pigs which can identify large flying things looking for food? Is the shape of a Condor somehow passed down from generation to generation?

Part Two:

In the Lake District the sheep are forgetting.

They have forgotten the little paths to the high grass and they have forgotten how to get back down from the high pastures when they are up there. This is because the sheep that have died from disease have not been replaced with local, or knowledgeable sheep, but instead new foreign sheep have been brought in and they do not know the way. This sounds silly, but if there is a little tiny footpath up to high pastures the sheep pass the route down from generation to generation. Without that Sheepy, local knowledge the farmers are finding their sheep are getting stuck. But what fascinates me is not the poor stuck sheep, but how they were passing down the information in the first place.