How to get to know sheep

Savoring the sunset from our wrap-around veranda, with a glass of red wine and snacks, we feel at one with Mother Earth and nature, enjoying the antics of the seven dwarves, our ‘temporary’ sheep, in the paddock below the house. Sheep will, between bites, send out a bleat in your direction; it might be a demand for second and third and fourth helpings of food, even if their bellies are filled to capacity, but primarily it is to communicate. Especially Pavlova, she talks all the time. And she and Aries, Emma and Sophie, Gertrude Stein, Mrs Haversham and Lolita might live in a paddock, but these seven ‘fostered’ ovine relatives of ours are considered and treated as well-loved pets. And we get to experience life from a totally different angle.

Sunsets must be one of the most peaceful times of the day. In the countryside, the sun mostly does not want to suddenly drop from the sky or leave its huge playground of blue dotted with white fluffy clouds as toys. The horizon expands to its full capacity; the sun pours its reflecting light into everything it can reach, bathing the mountains and the visible end of the earth in illuminating light and shadows, stretching and coating them in quick changing reds and pinks and oranges and yellows and blues and purples and softly fading hues. It lingers like a reluctant departing lover and it plays and it strokes and it embraces, and clings to the horizon with its strong elongated fingers, holding on to that final glimpse before it is overtaken by night and moving on to shine its next ray of life and hope and light onto another piece of land, another day-awaiting country. As the day is closing down, the sheep graze excitedly, poking their noses in under the head of another chewing sheep, moving everyone around all the time, acting out their own version of musical chairs. A person would expect them to be quite thin, living off grass, eating numerous small meals a day and moving around all the time.

Then, after the sun has set, when the full moon moves in with its friendly round face to light the night sky, my sheep turn into an oil painting, little white faces lime-lighted by the moon, enjoying a nightly nibble, sending Morse bleats in our direction, hoping that somehow I might feel pity on them and turn up with another bucket full of lupin treats.

The whole scenario changes when it rains. The sheep will invariably stand in the centre of the paddock, away from the trees, doggedly allowing the rain to drench their coats. I have come to the conclusion that they must like or enjoy this. Or they employ the rain to wash away the dust from the red soil, softening the bits of grass and twigs and grass seeds stuck in their wool, for easy removal. Or they might just soak up the smells and knowledge of a cleaned earth, a soaked earth, a happy earth. Rummaging through their wet wool with your fingers, you are met by a dry, fleecy softness and comfortable heat, a body insulated and protected by a top coat of lanolin producing wool. Only when the rain is unkind, with determined streams jetting down to earth, pelting the sheep, they will seek protection under trees, or will stand the storm out in the custody of their corrugated or wooden shelter, or if else fails, stand with their backsides to the rain.

I might have more in common with sheep than I realize. I just love the smell of enormous raindrops plunking down on the pinkish-red soil and our corrugated roof. Fresh rain on parched red soil has the best smell in the world and actually, it is one of the things I miss most about South Africa, my country of birth and always my home country – that smell of rain combining with soil and earth. You just somehow never get that smell in the cities, most probably because cities are built-up and covered with bricks, cement, mortar, gravel, tar and lawns. An added bonus in the countryside is the changing skies: the enormous black sky pregnant with water making way for a grey-tinted backdrop, with the sun desperately trying to peek through all the barriers. And if you are a sheep, you get to enjoy it all: the feel, the smell, the sight, the sound, the taste, the beauty, the joy. Most humans still have to learn to look with more than their eyes; sheep have been using ALL their senses forever. No wonder that after the rain, the sheep are so frisky - they feast on the round bale of hay (called a roly-poly; makes sense, just think of roly-poly pudding without the apricot jam in-between the layers and the sweet dripping sauce) and pull out pieces of dry feed through the mesh-like wrap around the bale. Aries collects all these strands of hay in an endeavor to grab enough hay, and wears it as costume jewelry around his neck, which gives him a festive look, befitting the Celebration of the Rain feast. Watching them excitedly chewing and chomping and gamboling and dancing, moving one another along to circle the roly-poly, perhaps even singing Ring a-ring o' roses (just without the falling down part), leaves me feeling I am missing out on the carousel ride.

Daytime, especially in the heat of the day, when they are held captive by the shade of the Eucalyptus trees, the sheep are neat, tidy, little rounded mounds, with only the twitching of their ears flicking the flies away indicating at which end the head is. There they will sleep, ruminate and meditate, chewing the cud, yawn, curl their lips and air their teeth.

Sheep are ruminants (= an animal that has multiple stomachs, enabling the digestion of cellulose); they chew cud and are hoofed (two-toed) animals.  This qualifies them as clean animals in the biblical sense; not that this is of any consolation to the sheep, people regarding them as meat (not very comforting to say the least) rather than getting to know them as intelligent, emotional beings.

Just a short lesson in biology: sheep have four stomachs.    Whatever the sheep eats (mainly grasses, plants and seeds) goes into the rumen, where it softens and by mixing with saliva, is broken down by bacteria and protozoa.  Regurgitating the partially digested food, called a cud, the sheep re-chews it, breaking down the undigested cellulose.  (Sheep are totally meditative and contemplative when they chew cud which gives meaning to the expression ‘to chew cud’; and whatever you try to entice them with in this stage of their digestion, will be ignored or even frowned upon).  The chewed cud then goes to the other chambers - reticulum, the second chamber, where fine plant particles are sorted for further fermentation; then the omasum, the third part where water and inorganic minerals are absorbed into the blood stream; and finally the abomasums, the fourth compartment and true stomach, where digestion takes place.   

Another lesser known fact about sheep is that they do not sleep all the time as most people would want to believe.  They take little naps, spaced out during the day and night, and sleep lightly.  If you add all the little ‘cat’ naps of sheep together at the end of the day, you will find that they most probably only sleep for about 3.5 to 4 hours a day.  And according to research, only about 2% of that time is spent in rapid eye movement (or deep) sleep.  By comparison, dogs sleep approximately 10 – 16 hours, koalas at least 20 hours, cats 16 – 20 hours and humans needing (but not necessarily getting) about 7 – 8 hours per day.

Sheep usually sleep in close proximity to other sheep in order to protect themselves (safety in numbers) from natural enemies (such as foxes, wild dogs, etc). They are our first line of defense (self-appointed) as they are extremely alert and will start moving or running around, a fraction before our cats will sit erect and listen and well ahead of our guardian Doberman who signs himself off duty during the night.  Unlike horses, which might sleep on their sides, sheep sleep on their front, legs folded under them, enabling them to get up easily for a quick escape.  Some sheep will sleep standing up (their knees lock), and the only give away telling you they are asleep is that the neck and head droop.  They sleep on bare ground, with no bedding although, for someone who wanted to try and feed sheep on ‘place mats’ (see HOW TO MEET SHEEP), I was tempted (if Mike Tyson could ensure comfort for his pigeons by including air-conditioning in his $12.000 pigeon coop…). But they do ‘make their beds’ - they kick and they scratch and they scrape and they scuff and they stomp with their hooves until they remove all the vegetation, leaving them with hollow ‘nests’ in the sand.    

Hair sheep, some hair x wool crosses and sheep of primitive breeds do not need shearing and/or will naturally shed their coats; not our sheep. Our seven woolly creatures are of a kind (Merino/Dorset cross) who needs to be shorn. I am still not sure who is more traumatized when it comes to shearing time: the sheep, me, the shearer, my dog or the cats. This changing of coats happens twice a year in our area. After the worst heat of summer, but also before the much cooler weather of winter, which makes it end April/beginning May in Western Australia. And then again at the end of winter, when the days are longer and the temperatures higher, but before the flies zoom in to lay their eggs and breed maggots in the flesh of the sheep. And if it sounds terrible, I can confirm that it is absolutely horrible. The second wardrobe change takes place in spring (September here in the land downunder). It is a fine balance to maintain: they need their wool to protect them against heat and cold, but they also need to be shorn to prevent fly-strike and overheating in summer. Short coats helps in keeping the tail area clean when the winter rains offer the sheep these feasts of greens, invariably resulting in scouring (diarrhea), which in turn attracts flies – a big vicious circle. If they are shorn too late into winter, on the other hand, they might freeze to death (wet and cold). Sheep need extra protection and nutrition to help them through inclement weather after shearing until the lanolin and the quick growing wool take over as temperature controllers and raincoats.

Initially, in my ignorant wisdom when we just moved to the countryside, I believed I could shear our sheep myself, with clipping scissors. Fortunately I did not also consider salon chairs and pink and white cloaks to drape around the sheep. Most probably anyone can try to shear sheep, but it is a very specialized job and definitely not for the inexperienced. First, trying to cut through lanolin enriched wool is virtually impossible with ordinary clippers or scissors. You need the correct shearing equipment. And then, when you have the equipment, you need the skill to shear the sheep without causing them (or you) cuts or injuries, and trauma. Shearing is very stressful to sheep, even in the hands of the experienced shearer. In the hands of an inexperienced and unskilled shearer, shearing becomes a nightmare to the sheep and everyone will be totally traumatized.

The first time we experienced sheep shearing in our own fold (as I explained in How to meet sheep, I grew up in a family of sheep farmers and shearing was always part of our education/holidays), I realized how different it was and what all was involved if it concerns your ‘own’ flock (usually five or more sheep make up a flock) and in a country with a different shearing culture.

In anticipation of the big day, I decided to spoil the sheep with a bit of extra food, which delighted them endlessly. They did some extra dances for me in the moonlight to say thank you. I woke the morning with dread, worrying about the poor sheep that would shortly be without their oversized wool coats. Whilst waiting for the shearer, and pitying the poor souls, I kept on feeding them by hand. They never complained a single bit and I was satisfied that at least they were happy and calm.

The shearer looked a bit put out when he arrived, and my daughter and I sat on the verandah, watching him, my husband and an unhelpful assistant reluctantly chasing the sheep across the paddock (perhaps 1 acre in size), in endless circles, a race with an obvious advantage to the sheep, which delighted me endlessly. I would have liked to tell you they gently shepherded them to a proverbial shearing platform, but gently, shepherded and shearing platform will not make it into my story. When the running and chasing proved to be futile, the shearer got into his ‘Ute’ (small pick-up truck) and with a dark face reminding me of Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights fame he started chasing the poor souls on wheels rather than on foot. I need not say this proved even more frightening to the sheep that employed every trick in the Law Book of Sheep to avoid being caught. Aries proved that he knew more evasive tactics than a professional wing in a game of rugby/football and he used it to his and the advantage of his harem, successfully herding them away from the chasers, whatever method of capture they might try. It was actually hilarious to watch, and silently I was cheering the sheep on. I was adamant that I would not be involved in the shearing, as I read that the sheep will not forgive me nor take food from me if they ‘see’ my hand in the shearing process. But my daughter, tears of laughter running down her cheeks, worked up such sympathy for the three men, with me nurturing my sympathy for the poor sheep that she decided to join the chase. With seemingly little further effort (our daughter embraced one sheep, arms around its neck, gently sitting on it to keep it from running off again); all seven were jailed in a little holding pen. Perhaps they were too exhausted to struggle any further; perhaps it was our feminine presence and our gentle touch.

I was to learn later that before sheep are to be shorn, they should miss a meal or two, otherwise they are too strong and energetic to be caught. Oops. We also learnt that sheep had to be penned up, all ready for shearing, and that it was not the responsibility of the shearer to chase them. No wonder the assistant looked so reluctant, and the shearer all but amused. My belated humble apologies to the shearer. (Proper sheep farmers employ their specially bred and trained sheep dogs to round up or herd their sheep.) We now also know that if the sheep are wet, they will not be shorn. Fortunately that was not added to our transgressions.

There are still places where sheep are shorn with hand shears/blades, but fortunately in Australia electric shears are used. And we do not tie the sheep’s legs, like some Spanish and Mexican shearers do. As a matter of interest, some farmers opt for crutching between shears, which involves removing the wool from the crutch of the sheep (as the name indicates) to keep their tail area dry and help in preventing fly strike.

Sheep are shorn on a clean, dry surface; in our case, the shearer used a piece of board/ply on the ground to keep the wool off the ground. Serious wool farmers will separate the belly wool and tags (wool contaminated with feces) from the rest of the fleece (fleece = wool from a single sheep in the shorn grease state). It is incredible to watch a shearer skirting and rolling a fleece. The fleece is thrown, flesh side down, enabling the shearer to remove the unwanted wool (off-color bits, tags, short, matted, contaminated), before rolling the wool from the outer ends in toward the middle, like a long sausage, finishing by rolling the fleece from one end to the other, leaving the flesh side out, neatly packaged for the buyer. Fleece must never be packaged in poly or burlap, which contaminates the wool; cardboard boxes are used by small farmers. Wool is packaged by class and color. Incidentally, until 1870, it was not uncommon in Australia for sheep to be washed in creeks before being shorn. The creeks were later replaced by hot water installations for this purpose (a tradition inherited from the Saxony sheep breeders in Germany; the Spanish washed the wool after shearing).

Considering all the running, chasing and tackling our shearer was subjected to, he worked fast and accurately removing our sheep’s coats.  A professional shearer can shear sheep in under a minute (there are records of 38 seconds for a sheep, 19.8 seconds for a lamb and 720 sheep in 9 hours).  In 1892, Jack Howe set the record for blade shearing (321 sheep in 7 hours 40 minutes), a record which has never been broken, and it took another 58 years before someone surpassed that achievement with MACHINE shears.    

The Australians are huge sheep farmers.  They also have very little help (labor).  It is not surprising that Australian scientists invented something to remove wool without shearing.  Sheep are injected with a protein, causing the wool to break.  They are fitted with a net, which simplifies the removal of the fleece once the wool breaks (about three weeks later).  Then there is also a robot which had been developed locally for shearing sheep.   

Back to our sheep.  As soon as the shearing was done (one sheep at a time), they were also drenched (wormed), a control measure against internal parasites.  For this, a tube is inserted into the mouth, deep into the throat and the liquid dosage is squirted as far back as possible.  The expression on Aries’ face was telling us enough.  This was followed by marking them with a color liquid (as they are busy making their escape, away from the shearer).  These blue lines running from their heads across their backs to their tails, reminded me of souped up cars bragging racing stripes across their roofs.  This is vital to ward off flies (and insects), protecting the sheep against blowflies.

Naturally, if someone took off my coat and leave me sleeveless, I will be traumatized and most likely upset.  I suddenly had seven poor ‘little’ orphans in their white creased skins, real nudies, only wearing stripes, folk in old-fashioned nylon pajamas clinging to the contours of their bodies.  The only thing missing were the sleep caps on their ‘wigless’ heads.  The fat, rounded, woolly brown sheep, my little flock, turned into these dainty shorn white ghosts.  And they did not recognize each other; there were no familiar scents.  The were running up and down, shivering, cold and traumatized, running away from one another, calling, searching.  It was actually so sad, I felt like crying.  I bemoaned the fact that I could not wrap them in warm blankets for the night.

And then, of course, it was also a matter of trying to get them to renew their trust in me.  The only one who did not hold a grudge when I tried tempting them with food, was Pavlova.  The others would cautiously come a bit closer, but Deon’s presence would enforce an immediate retreat and cold shoulder on their part.  They remembered: he helped in the shearing process (for a first timer, he did very well in grabbing the sheep, turning them onto their rumps to prevent them from escaping) and they would not let him forget it.  Forgiveness was a long way off.   

With shorter coats, some body parts became more visible and prominent than before the sheep were shorn. When feeding the sheep a couple of days later, I got the shock of my life.  Aries, our ram, was suddenly endowed with this gigantic body part, his pizzle seemingly swollen totally out of proportion.  Upset, I ran back home asking my husband to come and see if he knows what could be wrong.  We oh-ed and ah-ed and agreed it did not look right (fever, swollen glands, severe infection came to our minds), and decided I should phone a local farmer to please come and have a look and see if anything can be done about it.  Thankfully, to say the least, we were spared the embarrassment by first searching for such ‘ailment’ on the internet (at that stage, still a luxury and we only had an unreliable dial-up internet connection), before ‘phoning a friend’.  We learnt something new that day about the anatomy of a male sheep, a frisky ram.  And with what sweet result …

(To be continued)