On Sheep

This is a short, extra blog devoted to one topic and was stimulated by Sunday's Countryfile. This particular programme was devoted almost entirely to the championship of One Man and his Dog sheepdog trials, with short clips about sheep-related topics in-between, for those of you who aren't regular viewers. The actual finals were quite interesting, mainly because of the difficulties the shepherds encountered due, in part, to the appalling weather conditions (it was filmed on a wet and windy day in the Cotswolds) but also to the feisty nature of the particular sheep that they had recruited for the test. The producers had obviously not explained clearly enough to the sheep that their role was that of subservient, cringing docility and that the dog was in charge! First of all they turned and tried to face down the dog, moving into its personal space and stamping their feet, and then, once the dog had got them moving forward they did their damnedest to break ranks and scatter all over the field – at the end of the trial I gave the score as sheep: 5, dogs: 1!

Anyway, I digress slightly. One of the clips in between the action was Julia Bradbury going to Cambridge University where they have been studying a group of sheep for the last five years and have come to the conclusion that sheep aren't stupid! This may come as a bit of a surprise to some of you – they remember faces, can learn to recognise visual signals and can remember how to kick a football, four years after they last did it! Amazing! However, if they'd just asked anyone who has close dealings with sheep, they could have saved themselves (and the taxpayer, one suspects) an awful lot of time and money on this research.

I don't really count myself as a shepherd, although I suppose I have had quite a lot to do with sheep for a good few years, on and off, but I've decided to put together, in this blog, some of my own personal experiences of sheep intelligence and survival instincts:

One of the first sheep that Barry and I 'owned' was a ewe called Barbara. Some of you will already know about her. I have put owned in quotation marks because she, in fact, found us and tricked us in to taking care of her – we found her in our pony paddock one day and, although we asked farmers round about, no one owned up to having lost her so, according to Jeni, we rustled her, flung her in the back of the farm Landrover and took her home. At the time we had three orphan lambs that we were rearing so we put her with them as a sort of mother figure, thinking that she might pass on a few useful tips. One day, we went to check them and there was no Barbara, the electric fence was down and the three lambs were looking a bit worried about being outside their enclosure – of Barbara there was no sign. We rattled a bucket of food and called and called and, eventually, over the skyline came Barbara. As she drew nearer we could see that her neck and chest were covered in blood and when we caught her we could see a huge gash in her throat. Now 'everyone' knows that a sheep's greatest wish is to die, so we cleaned her up a bit, put antiseptic wound powder in the gash and shut her in our stable. The next day we fully expected her to be dead, but she wasn't, so we kept her in the stable and fed her hay and water and waited for the inevitable. Imagine our surprise when, about four days after the event (we think a dog got into the field and mauled her) we went up to the stable to find a Barbara-sized hole in the stable door (the wood was a bit rotten!) and Barbara back out in the paddock happily grazing.

We had Barbara for many years and she gave me endless pleasure, and Barry endless headaches! One time she broke out of the field – she was particularly good at this, as she seemed to know the exact moment when the battery on the sheep fencer ran out of power – and took three of our other sheep with her. When we discovered the breakout we searched the surrounding neighbourhood to no avail. Barry gradually widened the area of the search and came home triumphant on two counts – he'd located the three black sheep and managed to catch them and, as an added bonus, there was no sign of Barbara. Imagine his chagrin when, on returning the lost three to the field, he was greeted by the sight of Barbara innocently grazing, back in the paddock!

On another occasion, it must have been early summer, Barbara and her twin lambs were out in the paddock with the rest of the flock. The day turned into a blisteringly hot one and this particular field had very little shade in the middle of the day, so imagine our neighbours' surprise, on returning from a shopping trip, to find Barbara and her lambs fast asleep in the shade of their car port!

There are endless stories about Barbara but, eventually she went the way of all sheep and I felt our flock was the poorer for her passing.

We used to wean our lambs in mid-summer and put any ewe lambs, that we were retaining to augment the flock numbers, in a separate paddock along with any ewes that we didn't want to get in lamb again. These ewe lambs were kept separate for nearly a year before being re-introduced into the main flock and we soon realised that, after only a few days, we would see entire family groups grazing together – grandmother, mother, daughters. We knew that they were all closely related because we kept strict records as all our sheep were registered pedigrees, and it wasn't just a coincidence – we observed it on many occasions so, even though they were separated at just a few months old, they could and did remember each other.

Probably the most amazing thing that I witnessed took place not long after lambing, when the ewes were put back outside with their lambs. We always lambed indoors and put each ewe in a pen on her own with her lambs for a few days to make sure they bonded well, before putting them into larger groups and then, eventually back out into the field. We noticed that one of the ewes seemed to be driving off her little ram lamb every time he tried to feed, but was fine with her ewe lamb. Thinking she might have mastitis or a sore teat, we caught her and checked her over. No, there seemed to be nothing wrong, but she was reluctant to look after him. We noticed that a barren ewe (one that hadn't bred that year) would keep taking the poor lamb back to his mother, as if encouraging her to look after him better, but she ignored her. Later on we saw the little lamb trying to suckle this barren ewe and she was allowing him to. Knowing that she wouldn't have any milk we caught them both so that we could take the ram away to rear on a bottle, only to discover that the barren ewe was indeed producing milk! We put them back out together again and she raised him as if he were her own. When I checked our flock records I discovered that the barren ewe was his grandmother!

And then, of course, we come to the more recent story of No 74, my 'miracle sheep'. Back in April, in Cornwall, at the farm where I am at the moment, we managed to bring back from the brink of death a sheep, eartag number 74. Her twin lambs were successfully adopted by another ewe who had lost her lamb but, when 74 made her miraculous recovery, and was back out in the orchard with a small bunch of ewes and lambs, the foster mum allowed her to share in the care of her own lambs and eventually they had one each, which obviously suited them both very well.

The day after I arrived here a couple of weeks ago, James and I had to round up all the sheep to check some of their feet before he and Jo went away for two weeks. Somewhere in this flock of 64 sheep was No 74, but she didn't, in true storybook fashion, come running up to greet me. In a way I was a bit disappointed even though I hadn't expected it, really. James thought that as she was so 'out of it' when I was nursing her, she might not remember me, but I thought that she might recognise my voice because, all the time that I was coaxing her to eat, I kept up a stream of conversation with her – telling her how well her lambs were doing, how it would soon be summer and all the leaves would be back on the trees and the sun would be warm on her back again, etc, etc, you know the sort of thing (or perhaps you don't?). So, there we were, surrounded by 64 sheep and trying to read their eartags when I noticed a sheep looking very intently at me. I looked back at her and said, 'Is that you, Lady?', and I swear she looked a bit ...well, sheepish is the only word for it, because it was No 74, and I am convinced that she recognised me!

So, who needs a Cambridge University research team to prove that sheep are intelligent?