The violence of the lambs: a cautionary tale about a sheep

Wednesday, 13 October 2021

Orphaned Wairarapa lambs Holly and Taylor frolic in their jumpers.

OPINION: His name was Rupert, and he was a bad sheep.

At peak sheep in 1982, New Zealand’s ratio of sheep to people was 22:1. That’s now slumped to a dull 5:1, or about 26 million of the things. This is the story of one of them.

Something nobody warns you about when moving to the country is the unrelenting pressure to raise a lamb. Well-meaning townies terrified their children will have to take a goldfish to Lamb and Calf Day gratefully receive the animals from farmers, then ignore all their advice.

Our lamb arrived when my boss from the neighbouring farm asked if we could mind it for the day. “It’ll be good for the kids,” she said.

**READ MORE:

Rupert grew up fast and mean, eventually patrolling Virginia Fallon’s property like a woolly dobermann. (File photo)

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At peak sheep in 1982, New Zealand’s ratio of sheep to people was 22:1. That’s now slumped to a dull 5:1.

Rupert was a little scrap of a thing; fuzzy skin hanging in folds off his body, his bleats as gentle as a kitten’s purr. The kids were entranced for about an hour. I was hooked.

“Don’t treat it like a baby,” my boss warned that night, dropping off another bag of milk powder.

Rupert was my baby, and we went about our life together. He’d help me feed out, then ride in the tractor come afternoon. He wore a jaunty David Bain jersey and sunscreen on his pink ears. I wore him in a front pack when he was tired.

At tailing-time he was the last of his contemporaries to get the rubber bands and, even though I’d dosed him with paracetamol, he writhed and cried in the dirt with the rest of them. That’s another thing nobody warns you about country life – all that suffering.

Being a boy, Rupert got two bands. Eventually his tail came off in the hand of a traumatised child – “I’ve broken him!” – and his, um, other parts were never found, though my kids searched for a while.

Rupert got big. Farmers warned I was making every mistake in the lamb-raising book, especially the one about not bottle-feeding a fully grown sheep, but I cared not, at least until it was too late.

By then Rupert didn’t bleat, he roared like a death metal singer; charging towards you for his bot-bot, and bunting you in the knees till he got it. He was massive, patrolling our property like a woolly dobermann and bellowing to be let in the ranch slider while we cowered inside.

Townies brought their children to feed the “baby lamb” and ignore my warnings of what Rupert had become before he’d hurtle around the corner bellowing like a bullhorn. His eyes would be rolling feverishly; his top lip curled above his toothless gums in a death scream. At this point the children would also start screaming as the adults yelled “Throw the bottle away!” until Rupert ran them down.

My neighbour warned me Rupert was out of control, but I still let the kids take him to Pet Day. There, he dragged my son face-down across the netball court in pursuit of a baby with its bottle, then headbutted a calf, before winning “Mr Personality”. A few months later he headbutted my bull terrier so hard she flew through a fence.

Rupert’s end came after I’d wrestled him in with the neighbour’s sheep, ignoring the warning that the truck was coming that afternoon. When I went to fetch him he was gone; the only sign he’d been there a red collar hanging on a fencepost.

The kids were told he’d gone to a family who needed him more than we did – the same thing I said about their dad – and I learned a valuable lesson.

If you ignore everyone’s warnings, and everything goes wrong, don’t bleat about it.