FORGOTTEN FLEECE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 720, 1 May 1953, Page 18

FORGOTTEN FLEECE

bY

SUNDOWNER

APRIL 3

| FTER buying a Ryeland ram | A at Addington the other day -a quite unpremeditated purchase and perhaps impulsive. foolishness-I tried to find something about the breed among my books; but so far I have not been very successful. I have, however, discovered | that Ryelands were the favourite breed

of George the Third (‘Farmer George"), who mixed them a little with

the end "wanted no better sort of foreign sheep than the true Hereford Ryeland." How true my ram is all these years afterwards no one living can tell "me, but it is the opinion of Sir James Scott Watson that the modern. Ryeland -is much the same as the breed of which a wit once said that it deserved "a niche in the temple of famine" for its capacity to live on scanty fare. That, with its fine wool, seems to have been its distinction since it was first recognised as a separate breed and started poets singing of "Lemster Ore" (the golden fleece of Leominster, "as fine as the web the silkworm and as soft as the chee of a maid’). It remained the best of the fine wools till after Shakespeare’s day, and might have been the best yet if it had been lucky enough to find a genius to develop and advertise it. That, un- | fortunately, it never seems to have had. Though all the great breeds of sheep but two ar three come out of England, the great breeders, for some perverse -Teason, seem to have overlooked the ‘Ryeland in favour of Leicesters and "Southdowns and Suffolks and Lincolns and Cluns ("Shrops gone wrong’) until, 50 years ago, there were only 30 flocks left in England. My ram is one of the signs of the revival this century, and if it is true that Ryelands can live on sedge and heath I hope they will appreciate gorse. ve Merino, but repented of that, and in Pd ~ =

APRIL 5

CONTINUE to receive letters from correspondents who-believe that dogs know when death is approaching and go to meet it in secret. If they are right, as of course they may be, we should not

worry when old dogs disappear but rejoice that they have lived long enough to hear the call and been permitted to

answer it. How it comes we still don’t know, but the answer must be a sur-

render to weariness and drowsiness and a soothing lapse into sleep, I take it that young dogs are not included in this belief, or dogs. that for any reason die prematurely. But I can’t believe such things myself. I can’t imagine what advantage dogs have ever derived from dying secretly. If it’ is to escape the attentions, usually hostile, of other dogs, the result must often be an escape from known dangers to unknown. A dog knows where the other dogs are with which he has been recently associating. He can’t know what dogs may visit the place to which his instinct for concealment may take him. I can believe in a partial escape-a creeping away into some sheltered corner on home territgry: under a building or a bush or a thicket of trees. But that is not what people mean when they speak about these secret deaths. They mean sOmething more purposeful and more mysterious. The only scientific account I can recall of such mysteries is Hudson’s explanation of the secret burial grounds of the Patagonian guanacdo. Hudson’s argument, if I understood it properly, and still remember it accurately, was that there was a time in the history of the guanaco when it was biologically advantageous to it to retreat into the dense forest of Southern Patagonia; that the approach of death brought sensations not unlike those associated with those early retreats; and that for geological ages after the necessity for retreat had disappeared-prob-ably a climatic necessity in the first place-dying guanacos misunderstood the symptoms and repeated the race migrations. = If Darwin had not accepted the exist‘ence of these alleged dying places I would suspect that they were not dying places at all, certainly not chosen dying Places, but accumulations of bones

brought there by other agencies-floods, avalanches, erosion, or earth movements of which the record has disappeared, ss ss 7

APRIL 9

-_- ~~ T is a little annoying, a little depressing, a little more than anyone should take smiling that a truck of sheep sent to me from a footrot-free flock in Otago should have shown active infection a few days after théy arrived in Canterbury. I suppose it is difficult to keep road and railway trucks clean during the

busiest weeks of the year. I would, in fact, be surprised to know that the

attempt is ever made. But if infected sheep are accepted for\ transport, and nothing effective is done to remove disease ‘ germs afterwards, a railway journey for sheep at this time of year becomes a dangerous gamble, with the chances of escape dwindling rapidly as the weeks pass. I have, of course, no proof that my sheep were infected on the railway. It could have happened on the way to the railway or on the way from it. Germs could have been picked up’ on the roadside, in holding yards, on the floor or the gangway of a motor-truck. It is possible, but highly improbable, that the trouble began on my _own hillside: although it had been free of stock for two months, and footrot germs are believed to be incapable of survival for more than two weeks if they have no host, it is impossible to say that they never survive longer than that in any circumstances, The certainties’ of science are no more after all than laws or rules or occurrences to which no exception has been found, and I don’t think-anyone can say that no exception is possible in this case, All we can say, all I am trying to say, is that a truckload of sheep from a run on which footrot had not for a long time been detected, were put into a theoretically clean paddock and in a few days showed signs of infection. For the first two days and two nights of that period they had been standing in a railway truck that I assume had not been effectively disinfected before they were taken on board. If that was not the source of infection it clearly could have been. If it was the source, it is time farmers took steps to protect themselves. (To be continued)