Sue Weaver - The Backyard Sheep: An Introductory Guide to Keeping Productive Pet Sheep

This book is dedicated to Baasha and Baamadeus, two great sheep who have crossed the Rainbow Bridge you are sadly missed, my woolly friends and to my husband, John, who helps keep things running smoothly.

Baa-ram-ewe, baa-ram-ewe.

To your breed, your fleece, your clan be true.

Sheep be true. Baa-ram-ewe.

The sheeps password from the movie Babe (1995)

I came to sheep late in life, in 2002, after moving from east-central Minnesota to the Arkansas Ozarks. Friends in Minnesota kept sheep; I enjoyed working with them, but until our move Id never owned any. Then I met Anita Messenger of Liberty Mountain Ranch in Bismarck, Arkansas. She knew of two old sheep who needed a home and I had a home that needed sheep. So it was that Dodger, a Hampshire, and Angel, a Wiltshire Horn cross, came to us.

I quickly became besotted with sheep. I wanted more, and I wanted to raise lambs. I began shopping for a breed and narrowed my choices to Karakuls, Scottish Blackface, and Cheviots. An Internet search led me to Linda Coats of Coats High Ridge Farm in Columbia, Missouri, who was dispersing her flock of Miniature Cheviots.

Correspondence ensued and with it came pictures. I fell in love with her middle-aged foundation ewe; a month later, Brighton Ridge Farms #59, a black, beautiful matron I renamed Baasha, joined Dodger and Angel, along with a black ram lamb I called Wolf Moon Finvarra (Abram to his friends). More little sheep followed: two of Baashas daughters and a granddaughter and they all had lambs, beautiful lambs that stole my heart.

One day while filling the horse tanks I chanced to notice a scrap of wool snagged on the fence. At that moment, in a rush of emotion, I felt a deep connection with thousands of years of shepherds to whom wool and sheep meant life. Sheep fed and clothed ancient people. Sheep hides gave them leather and parchment. Sheep carried packs and pulled wagons. Their manure made fallow ground bloom. Women fashioned soap from sheep tallow, and sheep tallow candles lighted the night. Gut strings gave voice to musical instruments; sheep horns became shofars (wind instruments used to communicate battle and announce religious ceremonies).

Sheep no longer hold the central role in life they held before our modern world evolved; nonetheless, easy-to-care-for, affordable sheep still have much to offer. Consider the variety of wools available to fuel todays handspinning and fiber art renaissance; the ultrarich, high-fat milk to craft fine cheese; the luscious lamb for meat eaters; and the reason for and means with which to train and trial herding dogs. Best of all, they are peerless small-farm pets ready and willing to entertain their owners with their beauty, personality, and joie de vivre.

Can you tell how much I love sheep?

Sheepe doth both with his fleece apparrell us, and with his milke and wholesome flesh nourish us.

Barnaby Googe, The Whole Art and Trade of Husbandry (1614)

The Navajo name for sheep, dibah, means that by which we live, but the Navajo are not unique in their dependence on sheep. Throughout recorded history sheep meant life to mankind. Even prior to domestication, wild sheep provided meat to sustain hunter societies and pelts to keep them warm. Sheep (along with their cousins, goats) were simple to domesticate, becoming part of the family soon after dogs were domesticated.

Why Sheep?

Sheep neatly fit the criteria for domestication as espoused by anthropologist Sir Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, in The First Steps towards the Domestication of Animals (a paper published in The Reader, Volume 2, December, 1863).

They are hardy. Their young survive if removed from their parents and raised by man. Wild neonatal lambs could be cornered and snatched and raised on human milk. Thats probably how domestication began.

Sheep that are raised by humans like people. Sheep society is based on a dominance hierarchy; sheep follow and defer to humans who raise them.

They prefer to live in close proximity to their own kind. You dont need a lot of room to keep sheep.

Sheep breed freely in captivity. They are small and easy to take care of, reasonably easygoing, and versatile in their feeding habits. They flock together and can be tended by one or two individuals.

Sheepish Origins

While the exact ancestors of domestic sheep remain unknown, the Asian Mouflon (Ovis aries orientalis) is certainly involved. Five subspecies of Mouflon, a species that historically abounded throughout the areas where sheep were domesticated, share the same chromosome count (54) and DNA material as todays domestic sheep.

Two to three thousand years before the birth of Christ, Neolithic farmers settled the isolated four-island archipelago we now call St. Kilda, located 41 miles (66 km) off the western coast of Scotland. They brought with them semi-wild sheep much like the Asian Mouflons from which domestic sheep descend.

They salted the least habitable of the four islands with their primitive sheep to better utilize the sparse grazing available in St. Kildas fierce, storm-swept climate. In this hostile environment, the little sheep thrived. (When Viking raiders visited in the seventh and eighth centuries CE, they named the island So-y, meaning Sheep Island after the nimble, diminutive sheep dwelling there. )

Asian Mouflon

Soay are (the plural of Soay is Soay) a living remnant of these early domesticated sheep. These lithe, lean, fine-boned, elfin animals are active, sure-footed, and nimble. They have coarse hair coats in lieu of obvious wool; short, skinny tails; and horns. They grow an incredibly soft undercoat of wool as winter approaches and shed it again in the spring, exactly in the manner of their wild ancestors.

Did Ewe Know?

Where the Wild Sheep Are

Today, true wild sheep populations occur in western North America (Bighorn Sheep), northern Canada and Alaska (Dalls Sheep), Siberia (Snow Sheep), Afghanistan and Pakistan (Urial), eastern Asia (Argali), western Asia (Asian Mouflon), and Corsica and Sardinia (European Mouflon).

Most researchers, however, believe European Mouflon are the feral descendants of domesticated sheep taken to Europe by Neolithic Middle Eastern farmers around 7000 to 6000 BCE.

Argali sheep

Wild sheep occurred in shades of brown; most species have dark upper bodies and lighter bellies, a pattern that renders them as inconspicuous as possible when standing in full sunlight. Rams (males) have huge curved or twisted horns; in most species ewes (females) have horns, too. Their tails are shorter than those of domestic sheep.