By Dr. Robert E. Plucker
When I was
about 10 or twelve years old, my Dad had sheep on his farm. There must have been about twenty-five or
thirty of them. Each spring lambs would
be born, and as sometimes happens, one or two of the mother sheep would refuse
to take care of their babies. Dad would
usually give these poor little lambs that their mothers didn’t want to my
sister and me. We would feed them with
baby bottles (left over from when my little sister still drank from a bottle),
and keep them warm, and when they got a little bigger, make pets out of
them. Mom wasn’t always too pleased to
have one or two miserable, starving, cold little lambs in the house, warming on
the oven door, but she couldn’t bring herself to throw them back out into the
cold, and it usually took only a day or two to get the lambs strong enough to
take back outside. But their sheep
mothers never took them back, and so we would have pet lambs that would follow
us all over the farm yard like puppies and we grew quite fond of them.
My Dad’s
sheep caused some trouble, as they were always breaking out of the pasture
where they were supposed to stay, and running down the road. Dad finally lost his patience with them and
sold the lot of them except for the four baby bottle lambs that my sister and I
had raised. By this time, of course,
they were grown up sheep and no longer were the cute little pets we used to
have. But we still liked them and Dad
said of course he would not consider selling them.
So he sold
the other sheep, and one morning a truck came and we loaded them aboard for
their new owner to take away. When the
truck left, the four sheep that were not sold had to go into the pasture with
the cows. When they came home from the
pasture, they had to go into the barn with the cows. They drank from the same water tank; they ate
the same grass, hay, grain, and whatever food the cows ate. They were always with the cows and began to
think that they were cows.
This went on for several years until
my Dad decided that he missed having the sheep.
He liked to watch the lambs play in the spring and he even liked the
shearing of the wool off the sheep in the spring, which is really a rather
hard, dirty, greasy job. He liked the
money he got from selling the wool, too.
So he decided that he would buy some sheep. He advertised in the newspapers and finally
found a sheep farmer who would sell him about thirty-five sheep.
Very soon after this, a truck came,
unloaded the sheep and drove away. The
new bunch of sheep, glad to be off the truck which they had not liked at all,
began to explore the farmyard and the pasture where they were to spend most of
their time.
They seemed to be as happy
as a sheep can get over this change in their lives, but the four sheep that we
still had left over from their bottle-baby days did not like this arrangement
at all! They were not
sheep. They were
cows! They would not join the new sheep
in the pasture, in the barn, at the watering tank, or anyplace. In their little sheep minds they were cows
until they died.
Photos:
SHEEP: en.wikipedia.com
LAMBS: guardian.co.uk
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