HIP - A Lamb in Sheep’s Clothing

A Lamb in Sheep’s Clothing

By Kent Barker

I’ve often pondered how extraordinary it is that something as entrancing as a new-born lamb can turn into such an unattractive and generally stupid creature as a fully-grown sheep.  And this is not just my prejudice. Shepherds and sheep farmers will forever tell you that a ewe’s chief objective in life appears to be to kill or injure itself.

We used to have a flock in the field behind the house. Many is the time I’ve heard plaintive Baaaa-ing and, on investigation, found some silly sheep has got stuck half way down the river bank, unwilling to go forward and too frightened to go back.  Sometimes they get stuck in muddy patches. The more they struggle the deeper they sink until they’re up to their bellies.   A wire fence is also a magnetic attraction.  Through the hole goes their head with the ears acting as barbs when they try to withdraw.

I used to call the farmer to extricate them.  He’d grab their fleece with both hands and push them up the river bank, or haul them bodily out of the mud, or smooth back their ears so they could remove their head.  So now I just do the same.  Once you’ve got over the fact that they are pretty panicky it’s not difficult.

But at this time of year you can forgive a ewe almost anything as she produces those gorgeous lambs which leap and gambol and chase each other around the field with the warm spring sun on their woolly backs.  More than snowdrops or primroses, daffodils or bluebells, it’s lambs that herald the end of winter.

I was thinking of this as I was parking the car in a Hastings side street recently.  A group of young women exited a terraced house next to me, followed by their host waving them farewell.  The latter appeared to be not so much a person as a sheep, walking on its hind legs, smoking a cigarette.

Now, I may be a bit of a country bumpkin, unused to the ways of the town, but even I realised this was unlikely.  And, indeed, on second glance I could see she was, in fact, a girl in her early twenties wearing a rather convincing, if deeply unattractive, sheep ‘onesie’. 

As she went back inside I mused that this must be an extremely rare  example of lamb dressed as mutton.

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