Noun

Wikipedia herd (plural herds)

1. A number of beasts assembled together; as, a herd of horses, oxen, cattle, rabbits, camels, elephants, deer, or swine; a particular stock or family of cattle.
   • 1768, Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,

     The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea.

   • 2007, J. Michael Fay, Ivory Wars: Last Stand in Zakouma, National Geographic (March 2007), 47,

     Zakouma is the last place on Earth where you can see more than a thousand elephants on the move in a single, compact herd.

2. A crowd of low people; a rabble.

   But far more numerous was the herd of such Who think too little and who talk too much. Dryden.

   You can never interest the common herd in the abstract question. Coleridge.

3. One who herds or assembles domestic animals; a herdsman; -- much used in composition; as, a shepherd; a goatherd, and the like.

Herd refers to a social grouping of certain animals of the same species, either wild or domestic, and also to the form of collective animal behavior associated with this (referred to as herding) or as a verb, to herd, to its control by another species such as humans or dogs.

The term herd is generally applied to mammals, and most particularly to the grazing ungulates that classically display this behaviour. Different terms are used for similar groupings in other species; in the case of birds, for example, the word is flocking, but flock may also be used, in certain instances, for mammals, particularly sheep or goats. Large groups of carnivores are usually called a packs, and in nature a herd is classically subject to predation from pack animals.

Special collective nouns may be used for particular taxa (for example a flock of geese, if not in flight, is sometimes called a gaggle) but for theoretical discussions of behavioural ecology, the generic term herd can be used for all such kinds of assemblage.

The word herd, as a noun, can also refer to one who controls, possesses and has care for such groups of animals when they are domesticated. Examples of herds in this sense include shepherds (who tend to sheep), goatherds (who tend to goats), cowherds (who tend cattle), and others.