subject: The Secret Service Life Of Sheep [print this page] If you are asked what is the connection between the C.I.A and sheep the answer is that a sheep dip is the name given to a cover story for agents and for real life woolly sheep it is a means of ridding them of blow-fly, ticks and lice.
Sheep need constant treatment externally and internally throughout their lifetime if they are to produce healthy wool, hide, milk and meat. There are many different breeds with varying properties like Border Leicester for fine wool, Black Face Scottish for toughness in extreme conditions and Suffolk for breeding.
All the above breeds have at some time been introduced into the U.S.A as there were no indigenous sheep when Christopher Columbus first arrived.
Strangely, Americans eat very little lamb and statistics show the highest consumers of lamb are New Zealanders with an average of over seventy pounds weight per head per year with the U.S.A. just about one pound.
Even one pound per head is probably accounted for by the immigrants coming from lamb eating countries and in particular, the Middle East.
Even if you are a vegetarian, the fact is that sheep and bovines give humans a whole range of products that have been recognised for thousands of years. From sheep we have wool and dozens of products from the hide like sheepskin jackets, gloves and hats.
Nothing is warmer on the feet than sheepskin boots or sheepskin slippers in front of a roaring fire on freezing nights.
From cows we get milk, butter, cheese as we also do from sheep and additionally leather products have been in use for countless products for millennia.
Eggs from chickens, geese and ducks and meat from pigs all add up to the fact that farm animals play a huge part in our lives and as such deserve to be treated with care and respect whilst they are among us.
Like fishermen who risk their lives in stormy weather and return with their catch only to have someone in the market complain about the price so too farmers must get pissed off by people complaining at the price of eggs in their inner city superstore with no awareness of the cost of feed and the hours spent caring for the hens.
An astonishing number of young children in cities have no idea where eggs and milk come from other than the shop!
This is like the television news program back in the nineteen sixties when a broadcast live from a field in Italy showed a serious looking reporter revealing a spaghetti harvest shortage. The trees had only a few strands of spaghetti hanging from the branches and back in the U.K. millions watching this show were transfixed.
It was April the first and at that time few people had visited Italy and even fewer had eaten spaghetti.
Sheep in particular need a great deal of attention with drenches, dipping and sheep wormer with other attention they rank with cows as the top two time consuming aspects of farming.
