The Livewire Guide to Going, Being and Staying Veggie

Juliet Gellatley

Chapter 4 – Counting Sheep

Competition, we’re always being told, is good. It’s what gives us choice and variety and it’s what keeps prices down. But when sheep are concerned, all competition has done is make their lives sadder and more painful.

Sheep always look so content grazing away in the countryside, their little lambs running and jumping around, full of the joys of spring. Don’t be fooled. That’s about all the joy there is because in Britain alone four million lambs don’t even survive the first few days of life. In Australia, the sheep capital of the world with 40 percent of lambs to die within this time. It’s usually the cold or starvation that kills them.

In Britain and the West, most people don’t eat sheep meat – called mutton – they eat lamb. The natural time for ewes (female sheep) to give birth to their lambs is in the spring but competition between farmers has meant they’re now trying to get the sheep to give birth earlier, at the end or even middle of winter. If farmers can be amongst the first to sell ‘new season’s lamb’ they get more money for it.

Over many thousands of years, wild ewes have evolved to ovulate (become fertile) and mate in autumn so their lambs are born when the worst of the winter has passed and the grass has started to grow. It’s exactly the same with farmed sheep. But many farmers now treat the ewe with hormones which trick her body into thinking it’s autumn while its still summer. By mating their sheep much earlier, farmers are causing lambs to be born in the middle of the very worst winter weather.

Sheep which live on low-lying land in ordinary fields in Britain usually give birth to their lambs in sheds. The lambs are turned out into fields soon after birth, whatever the weather. The farmers also give their ewes fertility drugs to make them produce two or even three lambs when they would naturally only produce one. This causes problems because a sheep has only two teats (or nipples). The ‘spare’ lambs are immediately taken away from the mother and sent to market.

Bewildered, frightened and denied the tender care of their mothers, these newborn lambs await their future shivering in the cold. Prodded and poked by farmers to see how fat they are, they are bought for just a few pounds. Some are bought by fancy restaurant owners – but if you can understand how someone can look at these bleating, scared creatures and see them as ‘Today’s special – baby lamb roast with garlic and rosemary,’ please tell me.

What farmers are working towards is to make sheep bear three litters every two years. To do this they have to distort the ewes’ natural instincts by controlling them with hormone treatments. This is the start of factory farming for sheep and before long you may not see so many of them in the fields. Their home will be one big, overcrowded, disgusting shed.

Sheep which live on higher ground, like the Pennine hills or the Welsh mountains, live a much wilder, more natural life. They aren’t manipulated in the same way, but competition means that things are changing here as well. Farmers are cramming more and more sheep on to the hills, where there never was much grazing for animals in the first place. To save money, they’re cutting down on the number of shepherds employed to watch over them, and cutting out the extra feed they used to provide throughout the winter. Because fatty meat isn’t popular anymore, farmers are also trying to get rid of the layer of fat just below the sheep’s skin through selective breeding. But this is, along with the extra food, what helps the sheep keep warm when the icy winds of winter howl.

Although more and more sheep are dying because of interference like this, farmers are breeding larger and larger numbers, and there are now nearly 45 million sheep in Britain alone. Unfortunately, their future is not a happy one.

‘ I visited my parents to help with lambing and I helped deliver a baby lamb. It was beautiful. The nest day a farmer brought us a leg of lamb and somehow it seemed all wrong. I couldn’t reconcile what I’d been doing all day – bringing life into the world, just to heartlessly take it. I became a vegetarian.’
Jakki Brambles, first woman to host a daytime daily programme on BBC Radio 1.