Hector walked into the sea on Wednesday, up to the chest, without being led, and stood in it facing out the way he has stood in it every summer for seventeen years, and Nelson watched from a dry patch above the tideline with the expression of an animal who had agreed to none of this. The photographs came through last week. The old groom sent them with no message, as he does. The regiment had taken the horses down to the Hampshire coast for summer camp, the way it does every year when London has finished with them, and there they were, a line of Cavalry Blacks in the surf at Hayling Island, riders bareback, water to the girth, the whole black rank of them standing in the sea like a thing that had been ordered to. Hector did that camp seventeen times. The farmer looked at the pictures for a while, and then at the horse in the field, and then rang a man about a trailer. Twenty minutes down the road there is a beach that allows horses once the summer is over, and on Wednesday morning it had nothing on it but a dog walker and the tide going out. Nelson came off the ramp, took one look at the sand, took one look at the sea, and did the sum, and the sum came out at the trailer. He was persuaded as far as the dry sand and no further, and he stood there. Hector came off the ramp and stopped dead. The farmer says it went through him the way the funeral went through him and the girl in the hat went through him. The head came up. The ears locked on the water. Something seventeen summers deep sat up inside a twenty two year old horse and said, this, I know this. And he walked, with the farmer on the end of a rope doing nothing whatsoever, straight down the beach and into the sea. Not a paddle. In. Chest deep, the way the regiment goes in, and he stood there with the small waves coming through his legs and his eye half shut, and then he did the thing the young ones do in the photographs, which is drop his head and paw the water, great scoops of it, over and over, soaking himself and the farmer and half the bay, an old soldier at the seaside being twelve. Nelson did not move. Nelson is a desert animal and the sea is the largest quantity of the thing he most disapproves of, and he stood on his dry patch and watched half a tonne of Household Cavalry play in it for twenty minutes without once lowering his ears. Then Hector came out, streaming, and walked up the beach to him, and put his big wet head down over the little grey back, and Nelson took the whole of the drip without a step sideways, and turned, and walked to the trailer, and the horse went with him. The regiment was in the sea last week for training. Hector was in it on Wednesday for nothing at all, which he has earned, and he came out to the one thing on that beach that had been waiting for him on purpose.

A sheep can pick fifty of its neighbours out of a lineup and remember them for two years, and in 2017 eight of them learned to spot Emma Watson. The animal is the English language's word for stupid. Sheeple. Led like sheep. Follows the flock. It is the one insult the whole political spectrum agrees on, and nobody using it has ever asked a sheep to sit an exam. Cambridge did. In 1987 Keith Kendrick found cells in a sheep's temporal cortex that fired for faces and for nothing else, the same arrangement a human brain has. In 2001 his team showed sheep photographs of other sheep and taught them which face meant food. They learned fifty faces. They recognised those faces in profile having only ever seen them face on, which is a trick a computer struggled with until about a decade ago. They held the memory for two years. And when a flock was shown a picture of a stockman it had not seen for over a year, the sheep bleated at the screen. Sixteen years later Jenny Morton's group put eight Welsh Mountain ewes in a pen with two screens and a food reward, and taught them Barack Obama, Jake Gyllenhaal, Fiona Bruce and Emma Watson from photographs. Not the people. The photographs. Then the test: the learned face against a stranger's. Eight times in ten the sheep chose the celebrity. Then the pictures were tilted, which is where a fair bit of human face recognition falls over, and the sheep still beat chance. The paper's own conclusion was that sheep have face-recognition abilities comparable with humans and monkeys, and the reason Cambridge cares is that a sheep's brain is big enough and lives long enough to study Huntington's disease in, which is a disease that destroys exactly this. None of it will surprise anyone who has kept them. A ewe knows her own lamb by face at forty yards in a field of two hundred. A flock knows the man who dips it from the man who feeds it and behaves accordingly. A hefted Herdwick knows a hillside its grandmother taught it, without a map. What the flock does when it moves together is a decision made faster than you could make it, by animals that have been reading each other's faces all morning. The stupid ones were the people who spent four hundred years using the animal as an insult and never checked.