Wild life
Feeling sheepish
Aidan Hartley
WLaikipia hat is it about sheep? I can't understand it. I email my friends around the world and tell them I've discovered my idea of heaven, which is to ranch sheep on Kenya's Laikipia plateau. All I get is replies such as this from my American friend Eric in Shanghai. 'I'll bet you've shagged one of your sheep. And it was probably a ram — you bugger-happy Oxford boy . . . ' And this is from a man suffering what he calls 'Yellow Fever', which has got so bad he told me that on returning from a Chinese lesson last week a neighbour asked him why so many girls were visiting his apartment. Eric blurted out: `Wo hen xihuan xiaojie. Mei guarvci,' which translates as: 'I like prostitutes very much. It's no problem.' What Eric meant to say was, 'I like girls very much. Is that a problem?' And this offering from another friend, Jonathan: 'I have never shagged a sheep, though possibly, like you, the odd goat. . . 'Jonathan, by the way, is nearly 50 and a spokesman for a leading UN agency, so he should know better, but . . . he's Welsh. We all know what the Welsh are famous for.
So I want to talk about sheep. I've bought a thousand of them in the last month. It's hard work. The Samburu nomads have been bringing them down from the plains to the ranch. Each day, we wait for them under a thorn tree with our weighing scales. We keep our guns close at hand, in case bandits attempt robbing us of the wads of shillings we keep to pay for the stock. My wife Claire says to me, 'Please be careful, I don't want you to bite the dust because of damned sheep.' I feel like a true man when she says that, but then I hang my head and remember my friends' jokes about sheep.
Progress is slow. A Samburu warrior will wave his spear around, shouting at me for hours about the merits of a single hogget with a steatopygous tail as it hangs on the scale bleating. The nomads wear beads and ochre and recently they've taken to adorning their heads with sprays of plastic flowers. I watch the petunias bob up and down on his red scalp and only when he's completely exhausted will the nomad agree to the fixed price of 50 bob a kilo, spit into his palm and grasp my hand firmly.
At the end of a day's buying, we do indeed violate our sheep horribly. First, we
dose and inject them with so many drugs I certainly wouldn't advise eating them if the men amongst you want to avoid growing tits. Next, we get out our Burdizzo tools. We splay the legs of a young ram, known in the trade as a tup. Burdizzos are like oversized nail clippers. These are positioned over your tup's testicles and clamped tightly shut. There is an audible crunch — I have heard that crunch 2,000 times now, one for each ball — the poor animal sees stars, goes into spasms and then limps off, wondering what just happened to the only meaning of its miserable ovine life. Its only reason for existing now is to end up as lamb chops. What we do to sheep has put me right off my Sunday roast for good. I could almost be persuaded to write an expose of the East African meat trade and convert to Hinduism. But then I think of the money.
Within a month or two of inflicting drugs and castration, our sheep blow up like Sumo wrestlers. The business now becomes a race to get the sheep to market before the little buggers die. Sheep die of absolutely everything. They get nose bots that burrow into their brains. They get lung infections and tick-borne heartwater and bluetongue. Lions and hyenas scoff them, sly shepherds consume them under bushes, they get lost and die of loneliness. Sometimes sheep just die out of sheer spite, as if they simply intend to thwart your desire to make money out of them.
On their last morning alive, we do a gypsy trick. We let them eat a large amount of salt, then lead them to water. By the time the Kikuyu butchers' lorries have rolled up, a sheep can be wobbling around with so much water in its stomachs that it will add a couple of kilos on the scale. If all goes well, by the time the Kikuyu butcher pays up and drives back towards Mount Kenya, I'm so happy that I must admit I do almost feel like having sex with my sheep. I love the little things. There's so much wonga in mutton it's scandalous.
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