With many environmentalists calling for a drastic reduction in sheep numbers, our ovine allies really are under threat, writes John Lewis-Stempel 

Sheep? They don’t get much good press do they? What with the provisional wing of rewilders accusing them of “sheep-wrecking” hills through overgrazing, and then some #meatfree PhD student counting how many of their methane-burps will bring The End Time. Who cares? I mean, sheep, really. Cowardly (“sheepish”) things. Lambs to the slaughter. Also, a  synonym for blind stupidity, viz “Don’t be such a sheep.”

Anyone for the defence, m’lud? Me. I’m a sheep farmer. I’ll go to the Cross on behalf of sheep and shepherding. This is not a cheap blasphemy. It’s there in the Bible. Jesus was the “Lamb of God”, and simultaneously the “good shepherd” (John 10:11). The sheep is the emblem of the virtues of innocence, compassion and care in the Western Judeo-Christian tradition. Or we could get national. What made Britain’s original wealth, the riches that have made GB a notably stable democracy? It was the wool off the back of sheep in the medieval ages, hence the Lord Chancellor to this day sitting on a “woolsack” in Parliament. Need more proof of the importance of sheep? If you don’t butt in, I’ll ram home the points, beginning with the UK’s distinctly ovine-influenced toponymy. Been to Shepherd’s Bush recently? She(e)pton Mallet? I bet the Archbishop of Canterbury likes her new digs at Lambeth Palace. We are the sheep nation, with over 50 native varieties, more proportionally than any other country. We owe our sheep a debt of honour, as well as a round of applause for all they do for us today, every day.

Sheep made Britain’s hallowed green and pleasant landscape. Six thousand years ago Neolithic farmers rocked up on the south coast, found the place covered in trees (“the wildwood”) from sea to sea, and proceeded to go tree-felling, using their nibbling sheep to prevent new arboreal things growing. Take a bow, sheep and sheep farmers of yore. You created the South Downs, the heaths of Hardy’s Dorset, the North York Moors, meadows, and revealed the glory of the mountains of the Lake District from their monotonous tree-cladding.

None of the above landscapes are natural. They are places of livestock agriculture. And aren’t they wonderful? The traditional chalk grassland of the sheepy South Downs is as botanically rich as rainforest. And requires sheep to maintain it, due to the way they graze, suppressing the especially vigorous grasses and allowing a thousand wildflowers to bloom. Those who want to rid our landscapes of sheep – and they come not singly but in battalions of vegans, wolfy rewilders, and confused climate worriers – will rid us of our iconic landscapes and return them to wildwood. Which is to reduce the unique variety of  our national habitats.

From the front end of sheep, their grazing, to their back end, the emission of effluent. Or, what is technically known as sheep shit. You were probably taught at school all about the Agricultural Revolution with Jethro Tull and all that, but the first agricultural revolution was back in the mists of prehistory when some savvy early farmer realised that where sheep went first, crops grew better. A sheep is a walking muckspreader. How do you fertilise farmland without animal manure? The usual answer is synthetic, nitrogen-based fertiliser – which comes with more environmental problems, from nitrates polluting watercourses to the nitrous oxide released in its production than you can shake a shepherd’s crook at.

Farmed properly, sheep are boons to biodiversity and blessings to humans. Some 70% of UK farmland is marginal and sheep are very good at turning what humans cannot eat – grass and brush – into what they can eat, namely meat. Which is real “plant-based” food. The sheep economies of these predominantly wet and hilly regions are not “marginal”, except in the mindset of faraway metropolitans. Welsh lamb, the choice of chefs across the world, is fundamental to Mid Wales’s financial well-being, just as the sheep of the Scottish isles and highlands are crucial to the Scottish woollen and tweed industry. The sheep farms of those places, still largely family run, are also the backbone of rural society. No small thing, that.

Sheep shit is also beneficial for wildlife. The manure from a single organic sheep will feed in the region of 250,000 insects per year, the start of a food chain in nature that goes all the way up to the apex fox. There are dung beetles that specialise in sheep dung even to the time of day it is deposited. Make no mistake – if you make sheep extinct, you start on the road to the extinction of natural species. Use sheep manure wisely, however, and you boost natural species. Ever wondered why so few swallows fly over the wheat prairies of industrialised agriculture in East Anglia? Not enough sheep.

Oh, and by the way, climate change is not the only environmental problem in town – the mean soil loss rate in the European Union is estimated at 2.46 tonnes per hectare  annually, principally due to conventional chemically addicted crop farming. The UK is no different. We are, literally, running out of fertility. We’ll die of hunger long before we drown under rising sea levels. What better way to restore fertility than an old-fashioned system that includes, in its three or four rotations, grass for muckspreading ovines to ruminate on? That same grassland will  also store CO2.

Sometimes I wonder who is dumb, the sheep or us. Actually, I know the answer. It’s us, stupid. In perhaps the oddest academic experiment ever, sheep were taught to recognise photos of celebrities. No less than 65% of the sheep in exam conditions, even with the photos “corrupted” (mangled, creased), chose the right answer from the selection offered: Fiona Bruce. Sheep have memory and can recall more than 50 or more individual sheep faces for two years plus. There are humans who can’t do this. The ability of Larry the Lamb to categorise, rank and recall plant information is up there with the chimps.

They can also learn their name like dogs. My proudest moment in shepherding was when our top ram, “Action Ram” (nominative determinism if there ever was), escaped to “cover” a neighbouring flock. Their owner, on my arrival at her farmyard, said, “I can’t do a thing with him.” I opened up the boot of the car, called, “Action, come here!”, and told him to jump in. Bless him, he did. Sheep are also rather efficient at zoopharmacognosy, self-medicating on plants when they’re ill. (Until the early 20th century, it was common on hill farms for there to be a “hospital field” where ill stock would be sent for a self- cure.) Sheep have intelligence, and also emotional intelligence. Feelings. I’ve known of sheep who have pined following the death of their twin, and then died two days later, seemingly of a broken heart, despite having been in fine fettle. And a flock of sheep is a much more complex society than they appear to us – not least because sheep possess sexual orientation: about 8% of rams are gay.

I like sheep in the field, for what they do for the environment, for the way they put soul and interest into the day, into the landscape. I like them too on the plate, and so should you: traditional grass-fed sheep meat is a significant source of dense protein, plus omega- 3 fats, CLA (conjugated linoleic acid), vitamin B12 and selenium and niacin. It is also a source of zinc and phosphorus. And it’s best as mutton, mature meat, after the sheep has had a natural lifespan, also donating us milk and fleece. The milk of sheep is what makes some of the world’s best cheeses: I give you  Roquefort, Feta, Pecorino Romano and Ricotta. Then to the  wool, the best textile God/Mother Nature ever invented. Biodegradable, sustainable, with a “crop” every year.

Wool also stores carbon – something everyone forgets. Keep a wool jumper going for 20 years and you’ve kept carbon out of the atmosphere. Then, when that woolly jumper is done, you can shove it in the ground as fertiliser, rich in nitrogen and potassium. (Try that with your nylon clothing, vegans.) The pro-environment uses of sheep are almost countless… Number 24: wool as loft  insulation. Number 25: your wool carpet locking away pollutants such as volatile organic compounds. Or, in English, strands of wool underfoot keeping the air in your home clean.

Sheep? What’s not to admire? They deserve respect, for their good and indeed ours. A few years ago an item in New Scientist magazine reported that sheep in Cheshire were holding pieces of wood in their jaws and using the wood to scrape away snow so they could reach the grass. This puts sheep in the same category as primates as one of nature’s few tool users. So one day the  sheep might come back with AK-47s  and demand justice. I wouldn’t blame them.

John Lewis-Stempel is the author of The Sheep’s Tale: The Story of our Most Misunderstood Farmyard Animal (Penguin). His other books include England: A Natural History (Penguin).

This article is from Idler #107.

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