The Sheep’s Tale

John Lewis-Stempel

Doubleday, £12.99

Review by Susan Flockhart

SKINNING a newborn lamb requires “a sharp knife and a strong stomach”, according to John Lewis-Stempel. First, you must “cut up the dead lamb’s belly from its anus to within an inch of the throat,” he writes in The Sheep's Tale – an insider’s account of the gentle art of shepherding. Once removed from its unfortunate host, the skin is attached to an orphan lamb in the hope the dead lamb’s mother will mistake it for her own.

Known as “dry adoption”, this time-honoured process relies on sheep’s acute sense of smell and with a quarter-century’s experience of ovine midwifery on his Herefordshire farm, Lewis-Stempel has devised a genteel alternative. It involves confusing both ewe and lamb by spraying each with perfume, which he packs into his lambing kit alongside essentials such as disposable gloves, veterinary lubricant, thin rope (“to extract recalcitrant lambs”) and cheese wire (don’t ask).

Lewis-Stempel is an amusingly eccentric guide to the ancient, and sometimes gruesome, business of sheep-farming. A Country Life columnist who’s authored more than a dozen books on nature and wildlife, he now sets out to challenge perceptions of “our most misunderstood farmyard animal” through a combination of history, folklore and personal experience.

Tracing its origins to the wild mouflon that roamed the Middle East’s Fertile Crescent more than 10,000 years ago, he speculates that the domesticated sheep may actually have helped spread human migration northwards thanks to its fleecy pelt’s versatility as thermal clothing. Neolithic settlers are thought to have brought sheep to the British Isles around 4000 BC, though their dark brown stock would have borne scant resemblance to the fluffy blobs that dot the hillsides today, since Mary’s little lamb and its snow-white cohorts didn’t reach these shores until the Roman invasion.

These damp green pastures proved ideal terrain for a creature that thrives on scant vegetation with minimal human input, and when plague decimated the labour market during the 14th century, huge swathes of arable land went “under the hoof” so that “by the 1600s, there were at least 12 million sheep in Britain” (around double the human population by my reckoning), and today, the animal is deeply entrenched in our culture through nursery rhymes, proverbs and biblical parables.

Here in Scotland, of course, its unwitting role in one of the cruellest chapters of our history still rankles, which is perhaps why the author devotes only three sentences to the Highland Clearances. Tracing his own agricultural ancestry back through eight centuries, Lewis-Stempel describes himself as a “traditional” farmer and his book sometimes reads like a paeon to a lost era, when shepherds watched their flocks by night and regarded them with respectful understanding, rather than exploiting them as mere commodities. To this end, he quotes liberally (and sometimes tediously) from a 19th-century sheep-rearing manual.

His own observations are delivered with engaging wit. Lewis-Stempel has been butted, bruised and knocked out by sheep’s hard heads and methane breath. He’s seen lambs’ eyes gobbled by crows and endured cold nights under the stars, wrist-deep in sheep’s innards. Yet all this is recounted with affection for a species he says is unfairly caricatured as dim, docile and timorous.

On the contrary, he insists, sheep are highly intelligent and have even been known to use tools, clearing snow from grass using sticks held between their teeth. Some answer to their names and form lasting friendships – occasionally with people – and they can supposedly recognise up to 50 human faces. In one somewhat bonkers study, two-thirds of sheep polled successfully identified Fiona Bruce from an array of celebrity headshots. Nor do they always follow the herd. Many display distinctive personality traits and some 8% are gay.

In Lewis-Stempel’s view, we routinely downplay sheep’s intelligence partly to justify our contradictory attitude towards them: one minute, simpering over sweet spring lambs; the next, popping one into the oven. Around one million sheep are butchered in the UK each year and while the author isn’t anti-meat, he argues the animals “deserve a decent death” – preferably on their home turf rather than in abattoirs where they “sense their destiny” and have to be enticed to the slaughter by trained “Judas sheep”. He also favours the old-fashioned practice of culling only towards the end of a sheep’s natural lifespan, as mutton rather than lamb.

READ MORE: On Spring's frontline with Scotland's struggling farmers

His biggest beef appears to be with rewilders who blame sheep-farming for trashing the landscape and preventing woodland regeneration. “Treeland is not the only habitat,” writes Lewis-Stempel, who insists meadowland plays a significant role in the ecosystem. He thinks sheep-burps’ contribution to global warming has been exaggerated and wonders why vanishing breeds, such as the Scottish Dunface, don’t trouble those concerned with wildlife extinction.

Lewis-Stempel’s descriptions of the countryside are charming and his book is intelligently argued and full of surprising facts, though the structure is a bit ramshackle. Rather like a flock wandering through pasture – browsing contentedly one minute, chased by a yapping collie the next – the narrative is delivered in short bursts that switch from history to environmental commentary to personal anecdote: an authentic reflection, perhaps, of the scribing shepherd’s lifestyle, but it can be distracting.

Agriculture is a notoriously tough industry with a shocking mental health casualty rate and when I spent a day on a Lanarkshire sheep farm for the Herald Magazine four years ago, the impression gained was of a perpetual battle with the elements and the market, just to stay afloat. Lewis-Stempel’s jaunty prose doesn’t hint at this dark underside, and we don’t gain much insight into the scale and nature of his working farm.

He does, however, quite brilliantly evoke the daily muck and grind of animal husbandry. “In the slush and the urine of the snowy hollow I lie down and push the head of the lamb back inside the ewe’s fleshy birth canal.” “Action Ram is first for the pre-tupping MOT … [This involves] feeling his bollocks …”

But the image that will stay with me is his touching portrait of the shepherd at peace: dozing in an armchair in the wee small hours, clad in smelly overalls and cradling a bottle-feeding orphan lamb while Bach’s aria, Where Sheep May Safely Graze, wafts gently from the stereo.