Sheep

Earlier this afternoon, I walked along the Colne valley. One valley over from the Stour, it receives far fewer visitors. It’s easy to see why. The Stour has the connection with Constable, attracting the tourists to Flatford and Dedham. It is a proper river, coursing from as far upstream as Sudbury with a rich brown current in a series of meanders before emptying out into a wide estuary from Manningtree to Felixstowe and Harwich. By contrast, the Colne is not much more than a stream upstream of Colchester and it has not been memorialised by any famous painter.

Nevertheless, the valley has a quiet charm. As with the Stour, the hills on either side are barely worth the name but those slight slopes have pockets of ancient woodland on their upper flanks, giving the sense of seclusion. Near the river, it offers quiet parkland studded with oaks that must be a couple of hundred years old. I had the footpath completely to myself, and occasionally picked ripe blackberries from the hedgerows, watching rabbits scatter in front of me as they heard my heavy tread approach. Buzzards wheeled high in the distance.

Then I spotted a herd of deer in a field near the edge of the woods. I was captivated. I stood as still as I could, then slowly got out my phone to snap them for Facebook. They were some way away, and at maximum zoom and then cropped to blow up the picture some more, the picture had a fuzzy cartoon quality to it. Still, I immediately made the decision to put it on Facebook (the deer scattered into the woods as soon as I had taken the picture). The thumbs-up and hearts quickly rolled in from kindly friends and family members. Everyone gets excited about deer.

Just before I saw the herd of deer, I walked past a flock of sheep calmly munching at long grass in a field behind barbed wire. The more skittish ones sprang back a few feet as I walked past them. One gave a deep warning baa, too aggressive and low to be called a bleat. The rest just stood their ground. I was mildly interested, but I certainly didn’t take a photo of them. If I’d put up a picture on Facebook, family and friends would have been baffled. Sheep just aren’t that interesting.

But why? Sheep are larger than deer; they are indeed larger than almost any indigenous animal of the British isles. They have individual personality, they have a charm. They should be that interesting.

The answer why they aren’t is both obvious and revealing. Sheep, of course, are domesticated animals. As such, they are very common and very widespread. Most importantly of all, they can be found predictably. They are a part of daily life for those who live in the country. There is no mystery about them.

Stop and think about that. Really, there are very few species of domesticated animals. In Britain, we have pigs, sheep, goats, cows, horses, donkeys, dogs and cats. There are a few other foreign imports like llamas, but other than that we’re talking about pets of one kind or another. This is not a long list. Bear in mind also that goats and donkeys are not at all common and that outside Norfolk and Yorkshire we rarely see pigs, and the list is getting shorter still. Sheep are much more exceptional than we appreciate.

It is, when you think about it, extraordinary that we can see animals the size of sheep so easily in our countryside. They are one of the larger mammals on the planet (far heavier than a leopard, for example). As for cows or horses, they are majestic animals. They are both in the top 20 largest land mammals. Shouldn’t we find them incredible?

They weren’t always here. The sheep we see are all of foreign origin. Britain did have indigenous sheep, but these went extinct and the sheep we now have come from different stock. Sheep, pigs, goats, cows, donkeys and horses were all first domesticated in the Middle East. Pigs do have local wild boar DNA; in fact, the sneaky local males were so effective at breaking in and impregnating the domesticated sows that their DNA now dominates. They are the exception to the rule.

The Middle East made a similar contribution to our vegetable diet. Wheat, peas, beans, turnips, apples and cherries are just some of the plants that originated there. Imagine our diet without the animals or plants that we domesticated there. No wonder it was the setting for the garden of Eden.

We should have more respect for livestock. If we think sheep are stupid (they aren’t), that’s because we bred them to be docile. We bred out the aggression of cows. We bred all of them to be bigger and meatier. We should properly appreciate what we have helped to create.

So revenons a nos moutons. I looked again at those sheep, inspecting them properly. Watching them together in a field grazing, you realise that while they might be a herd animal, they have their own interests. They pay little attention to each other. In a field at least, they form an atomised society. Still, they stay together in their flock. If they do not converse, play or nuzzle with each other, at least they stand lookout for each other. Perhaps they communicate on some level that we do not understand.

They are, when you look closely, bulky animals. They stand stocky and squat, almost cuboid. Their legs are hench. They would not be lightly pushed over by anyone. Strength and sturdiness are not attributes that we associate with sheep. Rams, maybe, though mainly in the context of their sexual prowess. But not sheep.

When you look at them head on, you appreciate their intelligence. They weigh you up with their glassy hazel eyes, cautious and thoughtful. They are animals with opinions.

We have changed sheep through our intervention, but we have not changed them completely. They are a remarkable chimera. We have grafted on characteristics we desire onto a base. The base remains visible.

Our intervention was not a bargain, because we did not give sheep a choice. As a species, we still rely heavily on our ancestors’ past decision to domesticate animals. Whether or not that decision was morally justifiable then, does it remain so now? Have sheep done so badly out of the imposition?

The worldwide population of sheep is something like 1.2 billion. Among mammals, that puts them fifth or sixth, behind rats, mice, humans and cows and neck and neck with pigs. (The one big country that sheep are relatively rare in is the USA: there are only about 5 million head of sheep there. It seems Americans don’t like the taste of lamb. Sheep meat is an acquired taste, mind. For 5,000 years, settlers on one side of the river Bug in Ukraine ate mutton while settlers on the other side did not.)

Humans might have tried to domesticate deer instead: they certainly kept them captive, creating deer parks. If they did, they failed. Was that to the advantage of deer? Those deer I spotted might be wild but they are not numerous. White-tailed deer, the most populous deer on the planet, number only around 11 million or so. In that light, domestication has been wonderful for sheep if you consider population the most apt metric of measurement.

Is population the most apt metric of measurement? That depends what you have given up to achieve that. Better live a day as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep, the saying goes. Since there are only about 7,500 tigers in the world in total, sheep collectively live 500 years for each day that tigers collectively live, as it happens. That puts the maths of that saying into focus.

Sheep have given up a lot with domestication. They see most of their young systematically taken from them and killed, year after year. In the wild, they would lose young year after year to predators, so we must take that into account.

We also ensure that ewes are impregnated. How is that to be weighed in the balance? It is important to disentangle human actions that we might consider utterly wrong from the weighing process from the perspective of sheep. In humans, we would regard forced impregnation as barbaric. Would sheep? Would sheep actively prefer that? When looking at the impact, we need to look at this from sheep’s perspective. That means adopting their value judgements too.

I am entering deep waters here. I am in no way qualified to evaluate sheep’s value judgements. I head back to shallower waters, noting that we provide better healthcare for sheep than they can manage themselves. More generally, while animal rights groups may complain that farmers don’t look after sheep as well as they might, they still look after them better than they look after themselves. All that has to be weighed in the balance on the other side.

We come now, however, to the most difficult question of all. Over half a billion sheep are slaughtered every year — more than 40% of the entire sheep population. Some are wool-producing ewes that have reached the end of their useful working lives being sold for mutton, but more are lambs.

There’s more to think about yet. If humans did not exploit sheep, in practice they would not exist in the numbers that they do now. Horse populations have sharply declined in the last century since their muscle has been replaced with mechanical power. In the USA, for example, horse populations have shrunk by something like 85% in the last century, and we still have some uses for horses. If we stopped exploiting sheep, their population might crash even more dramatically. Few humans would bear the expense of feeding them or keeping land free for them that could otherwise be put to other uses. Would it be better for them not to have been born at all?

In humans we call this miserable philosophy antinatalism. It is a philosophy that is put forward at a time and in parts of the world where it is least apt. In the developed world today, the results of human procreation have plenty of free will and practical options. They may not have chosen to be born but most of us can make of our lives what we wish within wide limits. (In the past and in some parts of the world, this is much less true. Many slaves and serfs must have felt akin to domesticated animals. These are not places that are much influenced by the output of Western philosophy departments.)

Sheep cannot take a decision not to exist. We can do so for future generations of sheep on their behalf. Should we?

Instinctively, we might feel that we should not be taking decisions on behalf of another species. So far as sheep are concerned, we have already crossed that line. We tamed them, we changed them and we bred them. We are now responsible for them. Whether we like it or not, we have to make this decision for them.

So sheep represent a big part of a major question that we as a species will need to consider next. We have remoulded the world and our fellow inhabitants to our own choosing. What will we do with it, and them, next? As a species we have just about accepted now that our current way of exploiting the world is unsustainable. But if that’s true, as well as restoring lost ecosystems, there are going to be animals that are going to need to be much less common. Are we ready to play our part in that?

The answer remains undetermined. For that reason, alongside many others, sheep are very interesting indeed.