Sociability is defined as the tendency to be close to companions and can be quantified by calculating nearest neighbours. A method was developed to quantify relative sociability, which works well for animals that are housed in groups and are easily visible and identifiable. The time an animal spends as the nearest neighbour of other animals is scaled to have an expectation of 1.0 under the null hypothesis of random mixing, which is referred to as the sociability index. Nearest neighbours were identified based on being associated pairs (more often than expected by chance). Independent observation periods are tested for consistency. There were 8 groups of 7 sheep observed for 10, one-hour periods