More about Writers and Their Animals--Sheep

Below the Tree Line

In my new mystery, Below the Tree Line, Felicity O'Brien has three sheep on her property. She has taken on the job of caring for them to earn some extra cash from the fiber artists who own them. I wondered how worthwhile this could be for the artists, so I began my research there. One pound of wool can produce up to ten miles of yarn, and one sheep, depending on the breed, can produce from two to thirty pounds of wool a year. That's a lot of mileage out of one smallish animal. The main artist in the group, Nola Townsend, uses the idea of owning her own sheep and raising her own wool as part of her sales pitch. Felicity is impressed. 

For additional research I made my annual visit to the Topsfield Fair, which includes a sheep and goat barn, which is mostly sheep. I went with a good friend, Carol, who likes sheep as much as I do. We spent well over an hour there getting a good look at the residents. This was judging day, and some of the contestants were not happy, bleating and bumping, and others were blase. Most being examined for the meat market had been sheared and tidied up. Unless sheared, the fleece on a sheep will keep growing forever, sometimes getting so heavy that the animal has trouble moving. Domesticated sheep don’t shed.

This brings me to the strange fact that sheep have been domesticated so long that if released into the wild, they don’t become feral. Sheep were the first animal to be domesticated. The oldest wool cloth dates to 10,000 BCE. 

The oldest breed is the Jacob sheep, so named because it is mentioned in the Bible. Which brings me to a detail I hadn’t known about, though like many other details the evidence was in front of me for most of my life. In Psalm 23, the line “He leadeth me beside the still waters” is not merely a sweet, pastoral description; it is meant as a literal reference to appropriate care. Sheep can’t drink from moving or running water because of the structure of their snout. If they tried to drink from a flowing stream, they’d drown or choke to death. They also have no upper teeth.

When you look into their sweet faces and strange eyes, you are also seeing an animal that can look behind it without moving its head. Their peripheral vision is 270 to 320 degrees, compared to that of humans at 155 degrees. I still find the black slits in a pool of yellow disconcerting; it completely undermines the animal's cuteness in my view, but the shape of the eyes helps the animal see predators approaching. Sheep flock for the same reason fish school--to make it harder for predators to succeed. Both fish and sheep cluster less when the threat declines.

But sheep aren’t stupid. They recognize faces—sheep and humans—which Felicity learns, to her good fortune. And they are like humans in one other respect. They are the only other species whose gay members remain so for their entire lives, meaning they remain sexually interested only in their own gender for life. 

To learn more about Felicity and her visiting sheep, go here:

To learn more about sheep, go here or here:

To learn more about my books, go to www.susanoleksiw.com