Fordyce Maxwell: 'Shepherds will testify there is no limit to how suicidal sheep can be'

Published on Saturday 13 March 2010 19:32

IF IT were true that we learn more from failure than success I could qualify for Mastermind on the subject of sheep, particularly methods tried to revive a moribund lamb. So often in the final throes the Monty Python dead parrot sketch came to mind: "This is a dead lamb."

I must emphasise that this failure to work with or empathise with sheep is personal. There are good and happy shepherds. There must be, even if I have one friend – a total that might yet increase – who has worked with sheep all his life and still talks of this main lambing time of year as "the killing fields".

That refers not to any attempt by shepherds to kill sheep, tempting though that can be, but to the suicidal tendencies of many ewes and new-born lambs.

Admittedly, struggling with difficult births, weak and dozy lambs and recalcitrant ewes in Arctic nighttime lambing sheds, combined with naturally mediocre skills and a preference for pigs, gave me a jaundiced view.

But there is no limit to how suicidal sheep can be, as any shepherd who has found the biggest lamb of triplets squashed flat by its mother, one hung between the bars of a protective gate or one simply refusing to breathe in spite of every attempt at artificial respiration and prayer can testify.

I also made the mistake of counting dead lambs and ewes as lambing went on and becoming increasingly depressed. Never, ever do that, say real shepherds. Never add up until lambing is over, the dead disposed of, and surviving ewes and lambs are grazing sunlit uplands.

But forgetting isn't easy when your confidence is shot. As March and lambing time came round each year I would recall a Peanuts cartoon where Charlie Brown, attempting something underhand to win a baseball game, is asked: "Does winning a ball game mean so much to you?"

He answers: "I don't know. I've never won a ball game."

I never had a good lambing so looked forward to having one, by proxy, for the first time last week when BBC2 came live – a misnomer for a start I thought – from a lambing shed in Wales with presenters Kate Humble and Adam Henson.

Damn it, in spite of hoping for the chance to be sceptical, the bits I saw over five nights were cheerful and feelgood. There was a calm and certainty about work in the lambing shed that I never managed. This was a farmer and his wife – another Kate, star of the series – who liked sheep. Kate Humble was enthusiastic and hands-on – luckily, rams and ewes are more used than humans to having their main attributes squeezed and assessed – and Adam Henson is a farmer who has mastered down-to-earth television presentation.

On an ultimate live reality show there were deaths and mishaps. And if I know a prolapse when I see one – and I do – at one point a producer was yelling down Adam's earphone: "Move, move, we don't want to see that behind you."

There might have been other accidental shots I missed. But most of what I saw was encouraging. There are people who like sheep and are good with them. Where were they when I needed them?