Things About Sheep

A sheep will find the one place in a fence that wasn't properly fixed and go through it. Every time. The fence can be three hundred metres long and the gap can be the width of a hand and the sheep will find it, not because they're clever but because they try everything until something works. That's not intelligence. That's persistence, which is a different thing and possibly worse.

They also panic at objects that were there yesterday. A bucket moved six inches. A jacket hung on a gate post. My neighbour's son wore a red coat one morning in October and four of my Blackface ewes ran into the corner of the field and stood there breathing hard for twenty minutes. I know this because I was watching from the window with a cup of tea and decided not to intervene.

They are also, a ewe with her lamb, some of the most attentive mothers I've seen anywhere. She knows her lamb's voice out of a hundred voices. She'll walk through anything to get to it. I once watched a ewe take out a whole gate post to reach her lamb on the other side. She didn't seem to notice what she'd done.

I've been working with sheep for thirty years. I still can't tell you if I like them. I'm not sure that's the point.

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