h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Excellent!!!Well done! there's a missing "D" in one paragraph, other than that it is brill.

I must confess i tended just to let the silly things get on with it & thankfully, usually they did. Though did end up with rejected lambs lying around bleating pathetically & requiring bottles of milk every couple of hours quite often.

People who haven't actually dealt with probably have no clue as to how incredibly stupid they can be. Or how "aww, cute fluffy little lambikins" is actually "incredibly noisy, greedy, headbutting, self-centred little tyrant", assuming it manages the first lesson of survival "suck, you idiot, suck!"

We arrived on an organic farm as volunteers on December 17th. The owners informed us two days later they were taking off to Tenerife for a month. At that point there were 126, most of whom were pregnant. The owners cheerfully dismissed our fears "Oh, they aren't due till at least February!"

New Years Eve, 2 minutes past midnight....heavy snow & no spare batteries for the torch. You can guess the rest. Larry was the first of many & mother Didn't Like Him. Nor did i after a few weeks.

The 2nd one was blind.

The 3rd decided giving birth perched on top of the well would be a wise idea, she must have read up on birthing pools & got it a bit wrong.

The 4th got eaten by a fox, well, we assumed it was a fox, by that stage a horde of wolves could have appeared & it wouldn't have made much difference.

We left the rest of them to it & just did daily rounds, removed corpses & tried to count the damn things. By the time the owners reappeared, tanned & rested, they had around 200 & two very peeved volunteers. Their first words were "Awww, how lovely! Doesn't the farm look pretty with all the little lambs skipping around?!"

I am vegetarian, but i swear if i ever started eating meat again, i would begin with a juicy lamb chop.

zdt

That sounds incredibly familiar

You missed out one important feature - they stink !! After a day at the sheep, I had to strip naked on the porch and shower for at least 30 mins before Mrs SWL would come near me.

The curious thing is, lambs have a personality for about two months before they devolve into some of the most stupid creatures on earth. I am convinced that all sheep have one instinct - to die. Black-faced sheep have a supplementary instinct - to die anywhere but where they are meant to be.

If I had been looking for a chink in the Berlin Wall or a high security prison, I would just tell a blackie that they had to remain on *this* side of it. I guarantee it would be on the other side of the wall within 15 minutes.

Oh yes, oh yes. Show a a barrier & seemingly unplumbed depths of a type of intelligence emerge.

We used to dread the arrival of the postman:

"Bonjour! Pas de lettres; mais tous les moutons et dans la motorway encore"

And why, oh why, when they watch the Alpha sheep get hopelessly & expensively entangled in the tiny gap the stupid shepherd missed, do all, yes, all the rest of them have to try & copy it?

There is nothing so awful as mass bleating at 4am.

Have you considered a Guide Entry on Shearing: the Joy of pinioning filthy smelly shaggy things to walls & brandishing Sharp pointed objects?

Then there is dipping....who would have thought you could get high on Jeyes Fluid & cheer at floating maggots?

zdt

Well, if we're going to get yucky, there's the joys of foot rot, horns snapping off in your hands, crows pecking eyeballs out and castrating lambs.

Actually, castrating lambs isn't yucky at all. It's really quite funny

Castrating horses at 4am by torchlight with an extremely drunk French vet is fun too. I actually got told "Just hold onto it while i knock it out & make sure it doesn't bang its head when it falls over, OK"

Oh yeah, right. The blokes were all weeping over its impending loss of masculine identity.Traditionally they fry the balls up & eat them later.

They don't half make a thud when they hit the floor.Horses that is, not their balls which slide seemingly gracefully out of their sacs, fascinating.

zdt

Hmm. Never done that one. I've got a rather impressive scar on my thigh though from when I was docking cow's tails. Because the knife had to cut through my overalls, jeans and longjohns, I never noticed how bad it was until I got home. I nearly fainted, but I hadn't felt anything at the time

One thing I never mentioned in the entry is just how warm it is inside a sheep. When it's bloomin cold in a February snowstorm and your hands have lost all feeling, you have to thaw them out inside the sheep for a few seconds before you can actually feel anything

Oh gawd, watch it, you will have the Welsh Elecenticity Board doing ad campaigns to OAP's "Cold mitts? Buy a cut price sheep, warm hands & a free shepherds pie & look at that lovely fleecy rug."

Oh stop me, stop me before i email that Rowan chap....is it Atkinson or Archbishop? Ewe know the one.

zdt