Why sheep? Because sheep are soft and fuzzy and big enough to be challenging--yet not so big they can kill you with a kick or a butt. Because sheep have lambs. Because sheep are easy companions who require little beyond understanding. Because the wool sheep produce in abundance can be used for everything from sweaters to comforters to felt slippers to home insulation. Because a leg of lamb stuffed with garlic and rosemary and slowly roasted in your kitchen on a winter's afternoon will bring you to the apex of culinary achievement. And because, finally, as you sit in the hay on a spring morning with a warm, dry lamb sleeping in your arms and a watchful ewe breathing in your ear and nickering in the back of her throat to comfort the little fellow, you'll realize that you've grown unwilling to live without sheep. As my wife Sue once said as we walked into the barn and found our lambs asleep in a pile in the sunlight and the ewes chewing their cuds, with their eyes half-closed and their long ears swept back against their heads in a sign of pure contentment, "Wow. This is when you know that all is right with the world."

There are lots of sheep books out there, and as you delve further into the details of raising sheep, you'll probably want to own several of them. But what I discovered as a person who had grown up in the suburbs -- without the benefit of 4-H, farming neighbors, or hands-on agricultural experience of any kind -- was that I knew too little to even understand many of the books.

One book, for example, beautifully described a hundred and one ways in which lambs could be stuck inside a ewe and require assistance during birth. That was all well and good (OK, it was good and terrifying), but my questions were more fundamental: "What is normal lambing like? What is a typical birth?"

Another book listed the diseases and maladies of sheep in exhaustive detail. It's a list I have since come to respect and appreciate, but that list didn't help me back when my questions were more basic: "What is a healthy sheep? How can I tell if mine are healthy?"

These are the questions that this book sets out to answer: the big-picture questions, the general cases, the wide range of options. As you get further into being a shepherd, you may gravitate toward certain aspects of shepherding, such as breeding, working with wool, or perhaps pasture improvement. That's when you may want to consult the references at the back of this book to find out which book to buy next.

I was extraordinarily fortunate to have purchased my flock from friends who live not far away. I was able to pepper them with all kinds of basic and embarrassingly naive questions about living with sheep, and they calmly and steadily answered all of them -- never once striking the mortal blow that I dreaded, "Where the heck did you grow up anyway, the suburbs?" I went to them with a photocopied list of everything one book said I'd need to buy before lambing season, a list that struck me as recommending more equipment than most third world medical clinics have. My friends put stars next to the half-dozen key items on the list and told me to forget about the rest. Ah, perspective! Relief! That's what this book is about.

Living with sheep doesn't have to be any more complicated or esoteric than living with cats or living with dogs. You learn the basics, you get to know your animals, and you call the vet (or a friend) if something difficult comes down the pike that you've never dealt with before.

I should warn you, however, that as a budding shepherd, you will encounter one great nuisance that comes with raising sheep, and that is this: every friend and acquaintance who comes to visit you and your flock will, sooner or later (and most likely sooner), ask something to the effect of, "Aren't sheep the stupidest animals in the barnyard?" "Aren't they dumber than posts, dumber than the fence that holds them in?"

Sheep are in a tough spot when seen through our eyes. They are large and fuzzy and give birth to cute offspring, and as such, we naturally lump them together with the other fuzzy mammals in our lives: cats and dogs. Yet cats and dogs are, like us, predators at heart, with eyes set close together and a brain designed to sense opportunity and play the angle. It's no wonder we delight in how smart Fido and Fifi are -- for they look at the world the same way we do.

Sheep do not. They are herbivores with eyes set widely apart because they are, fundamentally, a prey species -- and a singularly unarmed one at that. Sheep have neither spikes on their tails nor thick armor on their backs. Their mouths lack canines or, indeed, teeth of any kind on the upper palate. Though they can easily outpace the shepherd in the barnyard, their speed is nowhere near that of moose or deer, their wild cousins. The great strategy that sheep have evolved in their defense is to stick together -- and they will go to extraordinary measures to do so, even if it means charging through electric fencing or grazing cheek by jowl in a crowded corner of a large, otherwise empty pasture. When one sheep decides to leave the barn, suddenly they are all up and running, moving as one big, apparently stupid herd with no individual expression.

But step into the pasture and try to herd them through a gate and your impression of sheep will change from brainless beasts to brilliant tacticians. Ramona, our oldest and wisest sheep, could maneuver any chess grand master into a corner. When I have a few spare minutes on my hands, I enjoy playing a match or two against her and her colleagues. I, moving slowly and nonchalantly, take a step to the left to cut off her angle away from the gate. She, her ears flapping gently against the summer's flies and apparently grazing without a care in the world, steps to the right. I think I have the herd trapped into a narrowing chute of fencing and she -- somehow directing the whole flock -- works them back into the open. It's a slow motion game of chess in which we both pretend not to be playing, and I always lose.

But sheep aren't the only barnyard animals that are, by nature, prey animals; cows and horses are equally wide-eyed in the face of hungry predators. Unlike sheep, however, cows and horses are large animals -- far larger than coyotes, wolves, or mountain lions. This hasn't made them immune from hungry jaws, but it has provided them with a sense of perspective and the ability to stand fast and intimidate potential predators with their bulk and, if needed, a well-placed kick.

Sheep have these same abilities but on a much smaller scale. When our neighbor's tiny Shih Tzu dog slips through the fence to visit the sheep, Desdemona, our freckle-nosed captain of the guard, invariably moves toward the little fellow, swinging her head menacingly and stomping her hooves in challenge. This is just as effective against the little pup as it is for a stallion facing, say, a lone wolf or a handler wielding an unwelcome bridle.

But Desi immediately melts back into the flock if I step into the sheep pen unexpectedly, perhaps holding a needle dripping with vaccine. I am much larger than the dog and hence more of a potential threat. Yet I am a known quantity with a reasonable, if somewhat checkered, reputation in their eyes. With my vaccination needle poised, the flock adopts an "intermediate risk" strategy, their keep-away-from-the-shepherd tactic. It's amazing how a dozen reasonably large animals can squeeze through your fingers as easily as Jell-O if they're so inclined.

But if you, for example, were to step unexpectedly into our sheep pen holding the needle -- a completely unknown commodity confronting them in an enclosed space -- they would adopt the strategy for which they are most pilloried by human beings: the huddle.

In the huddle, the whole flock runs into a corner and jams their heads as far out of sight as possible. This appears to be a version of the if-I-can't-see-you-you-can't-see-me attitude displayed by human babies and simpletons. What better example of sheep stupidity is there?

I confess I shared this opinion until I happened to be sitting down in the pen with the sheep when an unexpected visitor caused the sheep to huddle up in the corner near me. With my eyes near ground level -- and very near the level of a wolf's or coyote's eyes -- the effect was startling. A dozen individual animals suddenly morphed into a great, twenty-four legged, wooly blob with no front, no back, no eyes, and no obvious place to gain a toehold -- or a canine tooth-hold. If I had been a coyote on patrol, I would have thought seriously about going home for reinforcements before attempting to dismember such a large and weird-looking creature.

But back to the original question: Why sheep? In a profound sort of way, sheep are a lot like us. They are warm-blooded, they weigh about the same as we do, they give birth to cute offspring, they are obsessed with food, and they are inherently social creatures. The fact that their society is arranged differently from our society doesn't make them uninteresting; it makes them fascinating, and even exotic -- like travel in foreign lands. Living with sheep will certainly get you outside in the sun and into the fresh air and honest sweat of rural life. In the end, however, it will also show you a surprising amount about yourself and about those zany, warm-blooded mammals we all live with every day: our fellow human beings.