Jeffrey Michael Towe

The United States Marine Corps once promoted a horse to staff sergeant, and anybody who has read her service record thinks she was under-ranked. She was a small chestnut mare, bought in Seoul in 1952 for $250 from a stable boy who needed the money for his sister's artificial leg. The Marines who bought her ran a recoilless rifle platoon and wanted something to carry the shells uphill. They named her Reckless, after the gun. She learned the routes after being shown them once or twice. She learned to step over barbed wire and to lie down under fire. She also learned that the best food in Korea was in the tents. Her preferred breakfast was scrambled eggs and bacon with coffee. She drank beer with the platoon and once ate $30 of poker chips. In March 1953 the Chinese came at Outpost Vegas, with shells landing at hundreds a minute. Reckless made 51 trips up that hill in one day, most of them alone, with nobody leading her. Up with the ammunition and down with the wounded. She carried nearly 400 shells, more than four tons, over 35 miles of open paddy and a 45-degree climb. She was hit twice and carried on. The Marines watching said the sight of that little horse coming back up through the smoke on her own did more for them than the shells did. They made her a sergeant in the field. She got her second promotion at Camp Pendleton, where she retired with a paddock and full honours. She had worked out what the job was after being shown twice, and then did it by herself under artillery. Most recruits take longer than that to find the mess tent, which she had also managed on her own.

In 2004 the sheep on a Yorkshire moor worked out how to cross a cattle grid, and the village below them has not had a safe flowerbed since. A cattle grid is the simplest idea in farming. A pit across the road with steel bars over it. A hoof cannot grip the bars, so the animal will not cross. It has kept sheep on hills for the best part of a century. The hill sheep above Marsden, near Huddersfield, looked at theirs for a while. Then one of them lay down on its side at the edge of the grid and rolled. Over and over, eight feet across the bars, like a soldier going under wire. It got up on the far side and walked into the village. Others watched and did the same. Within a season the trick had gone through the flock. Villagers woke to sheep on their lawns, in their vegetable plots and browsing the churchyard. A local councillor told the BBC, with some feeling, that they were also clearing five-foot fences and squeezing through eight-inch gaps. Nobody had taught them. One animal solved the problem and the rest learned it by watching, which is how sheep learn everything, and why a flock knows its own hill. For as long as there have been jokes about sheep, the joke has been that they follow each other. At Marsden they followed the one that had cracked it, across a barrier designed by engineers for the sole purpose of stopping them.