Named and Known

We gave away four ewes at the end of last year. We gave them away. No money, no trade. Four ewes who’d already paid their dues to the flock in lambs given and fleeces shorn. Four ewes we couldn’t keep anymore. Lowland ladies that had been living as lawnmowers on my husband’s work estate for the past two years, that wouldn’t do on the hill with us and the rest of the flock. All of them our own, home-bred ewes whose births I witnessed, stood by with bated breath as they wobbled their first, slippery steps, nosed their way into the nourishing crook of their mothers. Little lop-eared lambs I helped onto their mothers’ swollen, dairy udders, kneeling in the straw in the birthing pens, hands and senses slick with sticky beestings and sea-salty birth. Four ewes whose own lambs grew fat on milk and heather, and ultimately fed us. Four ewes gone to give lambs and live out their lives on someone else’s farm, where every sheep has a name and every ewe gets to live out her old age. They’ll have a good home there, of that I am certain. I wouldn’t have let them go otherwise. We could have put them in the freezer, as if we needed any more mutton, or sold them as meat boxes, brought back a few scant euros for the costs of their keep, the price of their flesh given back to the farm. We can always sell meat boxes, but I’m tired of killing for the few scant euros that barely break us even on the costs of raising them, that don’t begin to pay for the hours of labour or lighten the heaviness of killing an animal we raised, named and knew. We could have sold them as livestock, at least got their live-weight value and let them take their chances in the big, wide world of sheep sales. But, no. We rarely sell animals. I just can’t. I never could. How do you put a price on a living soul?

We have a neighbour who breeds horses. Beautiful, strong, Connemara ponies with thick, flowing manes and dappled coats in gleaming colours of gold and grey, that rear their foals among the herd, running loose on the high hill above our farm, until their foals are sold. Our neighbour told us his father taught him to sell a horse before he was allowed to buy one. I never could sell a horse. But I was pretty good at buying them. I had an eye for a horse and I’d buy them young and poor, bring them on, give them good feeding and handling and train them up. I never made any money because I couldn’t sell them. There is an art to selling. It’s a skill of its own that requires a certain aplomb, and a certain layer of detachment. That’s where I falter. I can’t detach from the animals I bred, raised, named and cared for. I can’t let go, send them off into the world to take their chances. Maybe I just have unrealistic ideas about what my animals are worth, because I want whoever buys them to value them as much as I do, to know them like I do. To see beyond the price tag and see that they’re buying a living being with a name and a soul. Does my care for the lives I brought into the world, nurtured, named and knew end with an exchange of cash? There isn’t enough money to relieve me of that. So we gave four ewes away, entrusted them to the care of another in a cashless exchange of gratitude, to know that they have a home where they are known as Maisie and Marsha, and Daisy and Matilda, and that they won’t someday end up as nameless numbers on a factory killing line.

Maisie and Marsha, their hand milked dairy mother Freya, our first sheep, whose heart we buried under a hawthorn tree on the hill she never came to, and me wearing the same jumper I still wear every day, just with a few more holes in it, five years later.

As I write this, I am agonising over the final decisions on which ewes to cull from the flock in our final reductions. This will be a kill cull. Meat that will feed us. Fewer mouths to feed. Decisions I don’t want to make on ewes I don’t want to cull. Agonising to the point that last night I woke haunted, sweating and tearful, from a dream in which I was crying, calling their names Silver! Fiadh! No, not Fiadh! and fighting the faceless shadow figure who was taking my ewes for culling. But that shadow figure was me, and fighting my own shadow was futile.

We have a customer who buys our meat because it has a name. He won’t buy nameless meat. He wants to know that the animal whose flesh he eats was known and cared for as an individual with a soul, not just a livestock number. People ask if naming them makes it harder. I don’t know, maybe it does. Naming them acknowledges the individual, her character, her soul. Naming them says “I see you”. I think they deserve that, to be seen, to be acknowledged, to be known. They all get names here, even the ram lambs bred for the butcher. But what does make it harder is the time spent developing a bond of trust, of kinship, of the close, intuitive familiarity that naturally develops between shepherd and sheep, whether they’re named or not. These are not ram lambs bred for the butcher, six months of frolicking and fattening on summer grass and then they’re gone. These are my ewes. I have spent years with these ewes, handling them, caring for them, knowing them. I have lambed these ewes, pulled their slimy offspring from the salty waters of their wombs, held their snuffling newborns to their udders, sat with their grief when their lambs didn’t stand (don’t let anyone ever tell you they don’t grieve their lambs). They are named but they are not pets. “Pet” does not begin to describe the value these animals hold as providers of strength-giving nourishment, nor the respect I hold for them as vital beings and mothers and beautiful, funny, joyful expressions of Sheep. “Pet” diminishes, belittles. These ewes are my ladies, and I am only their lowly shepherd. But my role as shepherd is also that of hunter, and my obligation as keeper of land and flock is to keep numbers at a healthy balance, ebbing and flowing with the seasons and the capacity of the land, remembering, too, that this farm and flock must feed us.

The aim of our ewe reductions is to bring the flock back into balance with the land, and also back into balance with our aims for the farm, with our own capacity for the work and expenses involved in keeping them, now that we will no longer sell meat boxes. We have kept almost every ewe lamb for the past few years while the ram lambs and cull ewes fed us and our loyal, local customers. The flock grew and flourished on the hill, and the heavy number have done their job of chomping back the moor grass and scrub, feeding and disturbing the soil. Now we need to pull back, let the land breathe, let the heather and the gorse grow and leave room for the goats and the bumblebees and the frogs and the hares, and our tree planting and other plans for a more diverse farm. Sure, we could keep them all on tightly grazed fields with no room for anything else, keep pushing in inputs and balking at the feed bill, keep selling a few meat boxes to cover it. But I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t lamb and raise and kill the sheep I named and knew for the hollow return of barely enough money to cover their keep. Or labour long, demanding hours for nothing but the haunted dreams of the animals we leave at the butcher’s yard. It’s better to kill them at home, swift and sure, no stress, no betrayal of a life entrusted to our care and kinship to end at the butcher’s yard with stress-tainted meat. Everything dies and is eaten and I have made my peace with that. It’s the quality of life that matters, right up to a swift, calm death. But we can’t legally sell the meat we kill or process at home. It was never about money for us. We farm to raise good food and to know the animals that become our sustenance, how they lived and how they died. Nobody farms for money, but it’s when you bring money into the equation that things turn sour and murky. Priorities shift. A living has to be made. Regulations set for an industrial food system that have no place on the small, local, community scale must be adhered to, and the profound act of taking a life for the gift of nourishment is reduced to a sterile transaction. Maybe I’m just not cut out for selling.

But what if money didn’t come into it? What if we could just raise good food and share it or trade it for gift and gratitude without worrying about red tape and profit margins and tax accounts? We were gifted a big hunk of buffalo meat for our Christmas dinner. We never would have stretched to pay for it for just the two of us. But we sure did appreciate every last morsel of it! It fed us for a week, roasted then cold-sliced then stir-fried then stewed until every last lip-smacking ounce of nourishment was pulled from the bones. I want to see that the animals I raised and named and knew are appreciated that much, for the gift of their sacrifice. There isn’t a price point that can reflect that. What if the sheep we raise and kill could just feed people, in gratitude? A wild dream, I know, because it all costs money and time and labour to grow and raise and we’ve all got bills to pay. But I just can’t do it anymore. Not for the animals I named and knew to be left at the butcher’s yard, nameless and stressed, for the few, scant euros that barely break us even on the costs of their keep.

We bred no lambs this year. We will eat mutton that we knew by name—Misty and Aelfwin and Sable and others that will serve this little farm best by feeding us and opening space for something else to flourish—until the flock is few enough to breed a few ewes to replenish our freezers with lamb again. Perhaps an occasional meat box to pass along as the gift that it is, but no more to sell.

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