You, too, can live with sheep -- easily
A practical guide for would-be shepherds.

by Bob Lancaster

Here's the long-awaited sequel (or second in a series) to the classic Living With Chickens, which was much hosannahed, perhaps to excess, in this space a year or two ago.

Sheep are about as different from chickens as two common barnyard species could be. They are shy, good-natured, unobnoxious, herbivorous, clean and subtle. That subtlety is the key to their likeability, and it is very often mistaken for exactly the kind of dumb that characterizes chuckle-headed barnyard fowl.

The Old West cattlemen who fought the sheepmen popularized the notion that sheep were morons -- unlike their brutish longhorns! -- and the latter-day chicken men, the colonel and Frank Perdue and the Tysons and them, took up the libel and continue to defame the reticent sheep with it to this day. That's why we have these horrible giant chickenhouses befouling vast stretches of the landscape instead of picturesque sheep meadows, why we have chicken nuggets and strips and assorted organs by the billion and not nary one muttonburger drive-thru or bucket 'o lamb drumstick barbecued and calling itself buffalo. A sheep economy would have prospered here comparably, the great livestock expert Anton Smith once told me, and it would have been much healthier and more esthetic, and would have promoted a more bucolic, almost alpine, or arcadian, and much less trashy image. Sheep would've put us in a win-win situation, as the state legislators like to say, but of course it was not to be, and I try not to be bitter about this and so many other of our historical might-have-beens.

Living With Sheep is mainly a practical guide for would-be shepherds. It is full of good, sound, sensible and helpful advice for the tyro and, well, the sheepish newcomer to sheepkeeping. But the book takes frequent philosophical turns, which a sheep book probably couldn't avoid if it wanted to. For instance, just a few oblique references got me thinking about all the sheep symbolism in the New Testament. The early Christian fathers knew sheep well enough to model their behavior and many of their ideals on these pleasant animals.

Sheep are unaggressive, they won't push themselves on you, and they own a gentle disposition that suggests a quiet joy and invites a kind of mutual regard. It is a key to sheepness, as it used to be to Christianity, to not fight back when attacked, but rather to know there is safety in numbers and that passive resistance is usually the best way to foil the wolf or beat the devil. Ovine character studies might be of great benefit to some of today's in-your-face "people of faith" intent on making everyone as miserable as they are.