Virtual fences have been developed over the last 20 years with focusing enabling an easy and flexible pasture management for goats, sheep, and cattle. The focus on research have been on the animal’s ability to learn to associate an audio cue with a future electrical stimulus and their ability to learn a correct avoiding behaviour in response to the audio cue. No research has focused on what the presence of already trained sheep have on the learning curve of naïve sheep. Thus, the aim of this study was to examine if sheep have a faster learning curve when trained together with sheep that already know how to react to the sound cues in comparison to a group of naïve sheep.

Fifteen, one year old sheep, where divided into two groups of five (group 1) and ten (group 2). Additional five sheep of the same age, that had been trained on virtual fence two months before, was included in group 1. One day 1 the sheep was moved to two rectangular pastures with 40 meters from the back of the fence line to the virtual fence line. On day 3 the virtual fence line was move additional 30 meter to simulate strip pasture. Number of audio and electrical stimuli was collected by the system.

A success rate was calculated as ((#audio cues – #electrical stimuli)/ #audio cues) as a measure of how well the animal have learnt to react correctly to the system. Data was analyses using a mixed model in SAS, with #audio cues, #electrical stimuli and success rate as dependent variables and group, day, and their interaction as fixed effects. Animal was defined as repeated measure.

Day affected average number of sound cues, with an increasing number of sound cues from day 1 to day 5 (2.95 vs 8.25 ± 1.2, P<0.05). Furthermore, Group 1 had a higher success rate than Group 2 (0.94 ± 0.05 vs 0.75 ± 0.04, P<0.05). No other significant effects were found.

The results conclude that sheep learn to use a virtual fence and they get better over time. Additionally, it can be concluded that social transmission occur when sheep are being trained to use a virtual fence together with already trained sheep.