90 | harrowsmithmag.com
“Are they made of natural fibres?”
asked the young woman.
“Yes,” said the saleswoman.
“They are made of wool.”
“Orga nic? ”
“Organic and completely
natura l.”
“Oh,” said the customer. “I
believe in animal rights. After the
wool is taken, does the sheep have a
good life? ”
That stumped the saleswoman.
She was not a sheep person and
she couldn’t really say. I am a sheep
person and I had plenty to say about
the life of a sheep. But to my credit,
I remained silent. The last time I
got dragged into a discussion about
sheep’s rights in a public forum, a
fatwa was declared on me and I had to
move through a series of safe houses
until the whole thing blew over.
All I said was that sheep are a
man-made construction, the work of
a committee that has been meeting
on the third Thursday of the month
for the last 5,000 years, ever since
the ancient Sumerians started
peeling the wool off sheep and
spinning the fibres into scratchy
sweaters. Sheep no longer have a
“natural” state.
We have been growing wool on
their backs for such a long time that
if you don’t shear a sheep annually,
it will sicken and die. So to answer
the woman’s question directly, yes,
the sheep definitely has a better life
sheared than left in its “natural” state.
This notion infuriates animal
rights people. They would insist I
turn the sheep loose immediately,
give it a public apology and set up
a trust fund for its needs (which
they would supervise, of course).
Unfortunately, sheep have been
looked after for so long that they
can’t survive very long without the
attention of a shepherd. This was
already true 2,500 years ago and
one of the reasons sheep appeared
so often in the Bible. Like people,
they need a lot of supervising. Left
to their own devices, they always
get into trouble. Dogs run them to
death, wolves sneak in and kill them
one at a time, they eat wild cherry
leaves and keel over. They roll into
holes and can’t get up. They walk
over cliffs. If they break through a
hole in the fence, they walk into the
nearest farm outbuilding and you
can just hear them ask, “What’s
toxic in here, Marj?”For the fact is, animals do not
have rights. If they did, they would
also have responsibilities and
that would make a cat a murderer,
which is absurd. I am the one with
the rights, not the sheep. And as
Thomas Paine told us, those rights
place us “in close connection
with our duties,” the chief one
being an obligation to practise
stewardship of all things in our
care. Stewardship is a stern and
demanding calling and few people
understand this more clearly than a
shepherd, who practises one of the
oldest professions on the planet.
It’s surprising I have anything to
do with sheep. Two hundred years
ago, my ancestors were tossed off
the land during the clearances in
Scotland and replaced by sheep,
who ate less and could be sheared
more often. My forefathers (and the
mothers, too) were shipped across
the Atlantic in leaky ships and
forced to make a new life in places
even a sheep would have found
unforgiving. No one ever talked
about a sheep’s rights in those days.
That’s because they were too busy
trying to figure out how to protect
their own personal human rightsTRUE CONFESSIONS FROM
THE NINTH CONCESSION
A DEFENCE OF
THE DRYER BALL
By Dan Needles
I was in a little arts and crafts shop last week
when I heard an earnest young mother with two
children in tow grilling the saleswoman about
a basket of “densely felted organic dryer balls”
sitting beside the till.