FACTORALY - 41 SHEEP

Episode Date: June 6, 2024

Sheep are part of our heritage. We have worn woollen clothing forever, we have walked on woollen carpets from Axminster. We have work sheepskin in fighter planes and in used car lots. There's more to sheep than black or white. Click on the pics, as always, for shaggy stories. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

hello simon hello bruce how are you diddling i'm all right thank you i've got over my chest infection and great i'm pretty much sounding the way I should now. So you're not sounding quite as Barry White as you were? Not quite as Barry White-ish, no. Hooray. Well done. So what are we doing here, Bruce? What is this?

What are these shenanigans all about? These shenanigans are Factorily. Factorily? Factorily is where two voiceovers, one called Bruce Fielding and one called Simon Wells. I've heard those names. I have as well. Basically take a very dry subject and make it wet. As being the opposite of dry.

Yes, or at least interesting for half an hour. Do you know what? That sounds like my kind of podcast. I might give that a listen. You should. What's the wet or dry subject that we're talking about today, Simon? Well, I suppose this could go either way, couldn't it? It's a very outdoorsy subject, so it could go either way, wet or dry. This week we're talking about sheep.

Sheep. Those barbed wire black things. Yes, those ones. Actually, talking of black sheep. Go on. Straight in there. I feel a fact already. Let's go straight in. Did you know that black sheep are more likely to be struck by lightning than white sheep? No.

So based on research of which sheep get hit by lightning, they have decided that more black sheep get hit by lightning than white sheep. Okay. Is there evidence as to why i think it's pure it's it's a random thing but i think that there generally are more black sheep that get struck by lightning i have no maybe maybe magnetic i was gonna say so there's either a property in the black wool that is more um electroconductive or it's that the black sheep of the family as we all know is a bit of an outcast. They're roaming around on the fields by themselves and more likely to get struck.

Quite. Or... Who knows? It could be anything. Wow. On the subject of black sheep... Yes. Carrying on that theme...

Yes. I had a quick look into the phrase, the black sheep of the family. Originally, up until the early 1800s, it was considered by farmers, at least in this country, to be good luck for a litter, a litter, a group, a birthing. I don't know what the word is. When a mummy sheep has lots of baby sheep. But it used to be considered good luck for whatever reason. If you're you, produced a black sheep, it was considered good luck it was very very specifically in 1822 the phrase started being used in local farmers publications in the uk as being a bad thing because um black wool can't be dyed that's true it's too dark yes and therefore it's it's worthless in terms of wool production

and therefore it's not so good for your economy to have a black lamb. Yes. So it was very specifically 1822 that the black sheep of the family switched from being a good luck charm to being, oh, actually, this isn't so good. He's not worth so much. He's a bit of an outcast. Yes. I describe myself as the white sheep of my family. In an entire family of black sheep. Yes.

Wonderful. But actually, talking of black sheep, working titles. So the working title for a very, very, very famous book and an even more famous film was Bar Bar Black Sheep. OK. I'm not even going to ask you to guess because it's impossible to guess. Jaws. Gone with the Wind. that was going to be my second guess so gone with the wind's working title was bar bar black sheep well okay i can accept that fine um so we've we've jumped right in in the middle of a subject we've taken a beautiful random fact that is usually sort of the midway point of

these episodes and jump straight in there where we usually begin which i will now circle back to is the origin of stuff so sheep have been around since forever um they were they were not um domesticated until well i say not until they were domesticated a really long time ago they were not um domesticated until well i say not until they were domesticated a really long time ago they were first domesticated around 10 000 years ago in mesopotamia um and they were you know they're domesticated for their meat their milk their skins to make clothes and coverings and and things like that how many years ago 10 000 wow so long time ago um back then they were they weren't woolly and fluffy and cute like they are now they were more goat like they they had hair rather than wool and the the slightly woolier sheep were paired up with other slightly woolier sheep

for the wool uh that happened around 6000 bc right and um it all sort of started from there but yes they're originally from far off climes. They didn't reach Britain until about 3,000 BC. Oh. They started being imported from Africa through Europe and into Britain. Gosh. I have a fact about the difference between sheep and goats. Goody.

So the way that you can tell sheep from goats, sometimes it's quite difficult because goats can be woolly and have horns and things, or sheep can have horns. So it's quite difficult. So the way that you can tell sheep from goats is their tails. Really? So if the tail sticks up, it's a goat. Okay. If the tail flops down, it's a sheep. Really? As simple as that?

Yeah. That's wonderful. Great. Getting back to the Sumerians, which we weren't talking about, they're apparently about 4000 BC. They had gods that were sheep as well. Oh, really? Yeah. But then

the Sumerians made gods out of absolutely everything, didn't they? But the Egyptians mummified them. Oh. About sort of 3000 BC. Didn't know that. Yeah. Mummy sheep.

Mummy sheep. Sounds like curried goat, doesn't it? No, a curried goat has its tail sticking up out of the curried. The word sheep is a combination of old germanic slash dutch yeah uh originally spelt s-c-h-a-e-p i'm not going to try and pronounce that i'm going to choose to believe that it sounds like sheep yes i think it i think it would they've they've kind of been called sheep for a long time um the word mutton sheep meat yeah comes from a particular variety of wild sheep found around Turkey and Iran called the mouflan. Oh.

M-O-U-F-L-I-N, which it's thought that was kind of one of the earliest varieties of sheep that most other varieties came from. So mouflan became mouffon, became mouton, became mutton. Ah, I thought it was one of those things that like the Normans created, so that they had different words for the animal and the meat. There's that to it as well. So Normans had mutton as a derivative of mouflon. Yes. You actually see that a lot around the Norman conquest, that the traditional agricultural Anglo-Saxons, as we were at the time, we had our words for animals as the animal themselves. The sheep, the cow, the pig. The Normans came along with their feasting and their banqueting

and brought their words with them for the meat rather than the creature. So mouton, boeuf and porc. Mouton, boeuf and porc, porcine. And the two kind of sat side by side with the Anglo-Saxons saying, no, we're not going to use these French words for our animals. And that's why we have different names for the meat and the animal. I can tell you about Elizabeth I and sheep. OK.

So Elizabeth I, if we're doing historical. Yes. So Elizabeth I decided that too many farmers were just going, let's just kill the thing and eat it, rather than actually farming sheep for wool production. Okay, right. So she decided to come up with an edict which said that you could only eat lamb with a bitter herb. You had to have a bitter herb with your lamb. That's a herb which is bitter as opposed to a cockney saying i'll have a bit of herb yeah exactly um yeah so uh elizabeth first's um chefs decided what's a bitter herb i know mint oh you are kidding me so after eliz Elizabeth I basically invented mint sauce with lamb as a way of helping the wool industry.

That is fantastic. Don't you just love it when something so boring and dull and everyday as mint sauce has a specific origin story that involves a famous person and a particular event? Yeah, exactly. That is wonderful. Bravo. That's it. That's the fact of the episode.

We're going home. Good night. So physical attributes of sheep. Yes. Shall we talk about those? Go on then. Because they've got weird eyes. They've got very weird eyes, but quite effective eyes. They're rectangular. Their pupils are rectangular.

Yes, they are. And specifically sideways rectangular rather than sort of vertical slits like a cat. Yes, well, that's what gives them the practically 360-degree field of view. Now, I found specific numbers on that field of vision. Sheep have between 270 and 320-degree vision. Right. We humans have 150. Oh. So it's a lot more than more than us except they can't see red oh can't they well i can see red quite often especially when i'm driving but no sheep don't drive they can't you can drive a sheep but sheep can't drive actually

you can't oh really no well in the uk you can't drive a sheep in the car you're not allowed it's actually against the law okay but in america in montana it's illegal to have a sheep in the cab of your truck without a chaperone that's um i mean wow what a very specific stipulation i know i know and just in montana just what event led to that law being passed i have no idea i have absolutely no but in the uk if you have like you know you have a dog with its head out the window if you have a sheep in the back seat of your car with its head out the window yes that's actually illegal yeah oh what fun so their um their eyes as you as you say the the position of their eyes on the side of their head mixed with that rectangular pupil

means they're very very good at seeing around them because they're they're a prey species you know so predators have the eyes on the front of their faces so that they can zoom in and focus, picture an owl or something like that. Or wombles. Or wombles, absolutely. Most predatory of all creatures. Yes. Whereas prey animals have their eyes on the side of their head so that they can look around and defend themselves. There's a tiny little space directly in front and directly behind the sheep that they can't see. Blind spots.

They have blind spots. Do they have blind spot mirrors on? Oh't that be great warning this sheep is turning left yes actually they do turn left right they did some research um in in in, I think, or it might even have been in the UK, where they put sheep into a maze. I know. And they worked out that sheep turn left. Given the choice between a left turn and a right turn, they always turn left. That is interesting. I wonder why.

I read the research. God help me. What did you come up with, Bruce? Nothing. Oh, really? It just said this read the research. God help me. What did you come up with, Bruce? Nothing. Oh, really? It just said this was the result. This was the result. We don't know why.

Well, that's fascinating, isn't it? Now that leads... Oh, do you know what? We're really in sync this episode. Me saying a thing that sparks you to say a thing, which sparks me to say a thing. I live in Surrey. There are quite a few man-made reservoirs around my neck of the woods

that siphon water away from the Thames and treat it and pump it to the good folk of London so that you can have water reserves from us here in Surrey. You're welcome. Around a lot of those reservoirs, you find sheep wandering. Okay. And there's a lovely little symbiotic relationship between the waterboard and local shepherds. And they can use the grass on the embankment of the reservoirs to to graze their sheep yeah and um i i see these things quite often they're always heading the same direction they're always following each other

just like sheep do but they're always going in the same direction you never get um sheep sort of one going one way the other going the other way on the banks of these reservoirs. And I've never really sort of given it much attention as to why that's the case. Maybe it's weather dependent. Maybe they just, the sheep in front felt like it. But it's really obvious now that I've poked around a bit and found out why. It's because the grass that's behind them has already been eaten. And is it a left-handed reservoir? It's a... it's not European. I'm just trying to picture whether I usually see them going clockwise or anti-clockwise.

It's a look down from a plan view. But the reservoir sort of has a fence, you know, at one point. So the sheep get plopped in on one side of the fence. They go all the way around the reservoir, mowing the grass. And then they get back to the fence. They're ushered through and they start all over again of course they don't go backwards because that's what they've just eaten well sheep make excellent lawnmowers they do and they were used on the white house lawn in america oh really as lawnmowers under woodrow wilson who who brought in a whole bunch in the 20s and 30s to mow the lawn outside the White House.

But he wasn't the first person to do that. Because in the 1800s, Thomas Jefferson decided to bring a flock of sheep to the White House to keep the grass down. And he just liked having sheep around. But there was one ram, one Shetland ram, that was quite sort of aggressive. And this thing used to attack people. Okay. And it actually once killed a young boy, this sheep, on the White House lawn. Huh.

So there has been death on the White House lawn, but only by a sheep. Caused by sheep. Wow. They do eat quite constantly, don't they? Yes. Other than sleeping, sheep pretty much just spend most of their time eating. Which is fairly impressive given their lack of teeth. Right, we'll come into that in a minute. It varies how much they eat depending on how old they are, but roughly speaking, sheep will eat between two and four percent of their body weight in grass each day each day each day wow um so a 50 kilo lamb will eat sort of one

to two kilos of grass a day and a full-grown sheep sort of 100 150 kilo sheep could be eating three to six kilos of grass a day and they just they just go at it you know constantly all all day long you just you just see them mowing in the lawn don't you um this constant eating habit creates uh one to two kilos of poo each day per sheep you mean this little chocolate drops the little chocolate drops? The little chocolate drops, which apparently in the shepherding industry are colloquially nicknamed as yew berries. Yew berries. Berries from a yew. Isn't that lovely? Isn't that great? Go on then, teeth.

Teeth. Well, they is how they chew the cud. Right. And they have like a split lip at the front so they can kind of move the outside of the mouth around to move the grass around within their mouth. I can picture that, yes. And they just grind the grass up against their top set of gums top set of gums how interesting that must be quite a tough pad of it's very tough yeah it's practically tooth tough yeah but um it's it's an interesting way of eating so what else can we say about sheep?

Oh, they self-medicate sheep, apparently. Do they? If they're not feeling 100%, they work out which plants they need to eat to make themselves feel better. Oh, clever sheep. Yeah, they just instinctively know which herbs, flowers, bits of different grasses are going to make a difference. Wow. Obviously, that's if they're left to roam around a beautiful wild moor or something. Yes, exactly.

Not on the banks of the Thames Water Reservoirs in Surrey. Yes. Well, wild sheep are slightly different to domesticated sheep. For example, domesticated sheep have been bred so that they don't molt. Ah, right, yeah. So you have to shear sheep. And there are records. The Australians have records for shearing sheep.

Oh, of course they do. Yes, that's the whole industry, isn't it? Yes. They have competitions, don't they? Shearing, yeah. I'll put a video on factorialia.com so you can see how fast some of these people can go at a sheep and get its fleece off.

Wonderful. But yeah, in the wild, they just just molt but there are lots of breeds i mean we have 60 plus breeds of sheep in the uk alone crikey that's quite a few isn't it that's quite a lot of different sheep huh i can sort of picture brown white the one with the big curly horns and the one without the big curly horns and and there are sort of ones that are bred like fancy sheep and there are ones that are bred for their meat and there are ones that are bred for their meat and there are ones that are bred for their fleece. Right.

I mean, my friend Emma keeps sheep. Right. And I'll dedicate this episode to Emma. Hello, Emma. Hello, Emma. As for the wool, because there are so many different varieties, you can breed sheep that have different coarseness of wool for making different products. Generally speaking, the more mountainous and wet and rugged the terrain, the thicker and longer the wool on the sheep in that area and the coarser and the tougher product that that wool can make.

So, you know, a beautiful piece of Scottish tartan is quite rough, quite hefty, because it comes from big, thick, coarse, shaggy Scottish sheep living on the highlands. Yes. Whereas the softer wool for lovely soft jumpers and things like that come from sheep who just live in green, peaceful, flat pastures. Wow. So there's a correlation between how rugged the environment and what you can actually make with the sheep's wool. OK.

The average sheep over its lifetime of about 10 to 15 years can produce between 50 and 70 kilograms of wool. That's quite a lot. Which is roughly enough to make between 50 to 70 kilograms of wool. That's quite a lot. Which is roughly enough to make between 50 to 150 jumpers. Gosh, I have a hairy dog. Yes, you do. I've met him. He's lovely. He's a lovely hairy dog. And I groom him and get rid of all the old hair as I'm grooming him up. And I keep the hair in a bag, which I'll eventually have made into wool wool and then i'll have the wool made into like a cardigan or something i thought you were kidding when you first told me this but um you've mentioned

it a couple of times now and therefore i have to assume it's true it is true it's true the other but the interesting thing is that dog hair is 80 warmer than sheep's wool really yeah 80 warmer yeah can you imagine that, maybe we're breeding the wrong creatures for wool then. You normally find them in fields, as you say, in meadows. Yes. Where you very rarely find them, although occasionally you do find them, is in the street. Okay. Oh, I know where you're going well you don't well you may if you're thinking about uh freeman of the city of london ah then that's not where i'm going no it wasn't ah okay so um freeman of the city of london are allowed uh to drive

sheep over london bridge right it's it's one of the things you're allowed to do as a as a freeman of the city of London. I think subconsciously that's what I was referring to earlier on when I said you can drive sheep, but sheep can't drive. Yes. You can drive sheep. Except in Hollywood. Right. Where you're only allowed to drive up to 2,000 sheep at a time along Hollywood Boulevard.

Oh. So no more than 2,000 sheep. I mean, 2,000 sheep along Hollywood Boulevard would be a lot. I can't imagine there being any local shepherds with 2,001 sheep or more around Hollywood. Yes. I'm sorry, Sean, you're going to have to stay home. Poor Sean. I know. But are you thinking of Madrid then?

No, I wasn't thinking of that either. You weren't thinking of Madrid? No. So they have a thing in Madrid where they release thousands and thousands of sheep into the streets. Right. And it was to celebrate the drover's roads law. So at one point you weren't allowed to drive your sheep along public footpaths, which included things like roads. Right. paths which included things like roads right okay and then they in 1994 there was a reform that came

in um which was about climate change and farming in spain and they they created this drover's roads law the idea is that you want to move your sheep from summer pasture to winter pasture okay yeah and to get from a to b you need to drive your sheep along specific old public footpaths or roads to get there. So to celebrate this law that came in in 1994, which allowed shepherds to drive their sheep along roads, in Madrid, they have a thing called the transhumance. The what now? So transhumance is where you move things from summer pasture to winter pasture i see and and they have this special celebration in madrid brilliant apparently it's

not quite the uh the pamplona running of the bulls but kind of close but but but sort of like like like pamplona but hairier and woolly right well no it wasn't that occurrence of sheep taking to the street so there's a third there's a third set of sheep on the street somewhere simon the only thing i was thinking of was um do you remember during covid lockdown when uh the streets were abandoned everyone was trapped indoors nature started reclaiming itself a little bit yes there was a town in wales i think where a whole load of mountain sheep came down off the mountain and started walking around the town and mooching around the car park. I remember seeing it on the news. Yes.

And then, you know, everything went back to normal and they all went back to the mountain again. So I couldn't second guess you on that one, could I? No, you couldn't have done. That's way too specific. Yeah. one of the obvious things that you can do with sheep other than the whole wool production bit um is eat them um apologies to any vegetarians and vegans i love lamb how do you feel about lamb i adore lamb especially the way that elizabeth first liked it with mint sauce with a bit of indeed roast with a bit of mint um i Indeed. Roast with a bit of mint.

I was looking into what the distinction is between lamb and mutton. It's age, isn't it? It's age, exactly, yeah. So a sheep that's between one month and one year old, if that's killed and unused for meat, that is considered lamb. If it's over a year old, it's considered mutton. Mutton has a richer, more intense flavour, but it's tougher and stringier. And therefore you favour the lamb. When I was a nipper,

I remember there sort of being a constant battle between English lamb and New Zealand lamb. And I was just sort of poking around to see how much lamb we actually produce. In this country, we produce between 275 and 300,000 tonnes of sheep meat. That's lamb and mutton per year. Of that, we export 80,000 tonnes. So the vast majority of lamb or mutton that we produce in this country is actually eaten by us. There's a story which I'm unfortunately, I've verified, which was in Canada. They decided during the Second World War that they would come up with a chemical weapon to attack opposing forces with, which was basically a dart tipped with a poison. Okay. Pretty much like a blow dart. They would blow hundreds of these things up into the air, and then they would fall down on the troops at the other side.

Right. I mean, two interesting things about that. One is they asked the Singer Sewing Machine Company to produce the needles to do this. And Singer said, unless you tell us what you want to use this millions of darts for, we're not going to make them for you. Wow. Which I think was quite a good thing. That's very bold.

Yes. But secondly, they basically tested these things out by dressing sheep up in uniforms on a remote island near Quebec. Right. And then they fired this whole rain of poison darts into the air to see whether they actually got through the battle dress of the

sheep and entered the sheep. And they worked it out. The reason it didn't ever happen is because they worked out that it actually wasn't killing very many of them. It either wasn't getting through the battle dress or wasn't getting through the wool or the poison just wasn't killing very many of them. It either wasn't getting through the battle dress or wasn't getting through the wool or the poison just wasn't working.

So Canadians have blown poison darts at sheep. Well, that is not a thing I ever would have thought we would have discovered. Well, of all places, here is the place we would have discovered it, but didn't see that one coming. They have a very good memory, sheep. Oh, do they?

Really good memory. They can remember somebody's face for up to two years. Oh, really? So if you make friends with a sheep and then you go back in a couple of years' time and you go, hello, sheepy, they'll remember your face, which, frankly, I won't, which is fairly impressive because it means a sheep is actually better than me. The sheep has one up on you then. Another thing that a sheep will remember is its baby's bleat.

Oh. So mother sheep, which I found out are called dams, which I didn't realise, D-A-M-S. A dam will recognise her lamb's unique, distinct bleat. And when you sort of see a lamb on one side of a field standing all on its own bleating its head off and you think, oh, poor thing, it'll never find its mother, its mother will actually find it because it recognises its bleat. Because they have scent glands, don't they, on their eyes and on their feet?

They do. So they can produce a scent that either that the lamb can recognize the scent from the mum yes or the mum can recognize the scent from the from the lamb yeah they they can sort of communicate with each other through that that sense of smell they can make a particular scent to say there's danger up ahead or look i've found some nice grass or whatever it might be um but yeah it's interesting that they they have these glands as you say that secrete the scent from their their hooves and presumably into the ground so that the sheep behind them can then sniff the ground and go oh

yeah message received from sheep number one so come on then so give us some guinness facts about sheep well i found the world record for the most wool shorn from a sheep in one sitting okay a stray sheep was found in australia and now given the fact that earlier on i said the average sheep produces 50 to 70 kilos of wool over its lifetime, this sheep, this stray sheep who hadn't been shorn for several years and, as you said, doesn't molt and therefore it was carrying all that excess wool, they managed to shear 41 kilos of wool off this sheep in one sitting. Wow. of wool off this sheep in one sitting wow and when they found it it could hardly stand up under the weight of this wool you know it was sort of almost double its body weight yes in in wool um and the the fellow who sheared the aforementioned sheep was an australian chap called ian elkins who was the at the time at least the the national sheep shearing champion in Australia. How many sheep did he shear in a day?

I don't know. I didn't actually look at his record. Because there's a chap called Jack Howe in Australia, in Queensland, who's basically a legend. Right. And his record using hand shears, not electric shears, was to shear 321 sheep in one day. Goodness me. That's a lot of sheep.

Yeah, it was like the turn of the century, the turn of the last century. Which one? What, the 19th? The 19th. The 19th into the 20th. 19th into the 20th, yeah. And that hasn't been beaten over the last 125 years. As far as I'm aware, that still stands.

Wow. Well, good on you I'm aware, that still stands. Wow. Well, good on you, Cobber, if I may. Yes, seven hours and 40 minutes at the Allisdowne station in Blackall. Wow. There is a guy who's done it with electric shears. Yeah, okay, yeah. He managed 605 lambs in eight hours. Right, crikey so almost double the number yeah by virtue of having electric shears rather than manual exactly exactly um the the only other

record i found uh regarding sheep well i'm sure there are many but um i stopped trying after a while because they're just too many things um the oldest sheep i said earlier on that sheep live around 10 to 15 years at a maximum um the world record for the oldest sheep it was 28 years old that's impressive for a sheep how old is that in human years 28 years old um and this sheep came from a farm in Aberystwyth in Wales. It was born in 1960, passed away in 1989. Tragically, it was 28 years and 51 weeks old. It was one week off making its 29th birthday.

Do they get a telegram? Oh, well, that's all I've got on sheep that's all i have as well i think uh we have been bleating on for long enough so there we go that's the end of another fun-filled episode of fact orally thank you all very much for listening we appreciate it we do We do. Oh, subscribe, please, if you don't mind. Oh, yes. And like. Yes. Some lovely five-star reviews would be splendid. They're the only ones.

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We'll keep doing it. We'll just keep doing this until you tell us to stop. Until we get it right. So until next time, it's goodbye from me. And it's goodbye from him. Cheerio. Bye-bye.