SHIVERING SHEEP

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 938, 2 August 1957, Page 22

SHIVERING SHEEP

by

SUNDOWNER

JULY 10

N early discovery of every journalist is the reader with a longer memory than his own, and a better filing system. Because it is dangerous to forget him we usually carry him in the back of our minds while we are working and think of him frequently afterwards: But I completely forgot him

when I wrote my recent note about winter shearing, and forgot myself too.

Fortunately for the cause of science he did not forget me. He waylaid and lassooed me, and did it all so unexpectedly that I was a prisoner before I knew what had happened, Until I read Mr Story’s letter in The Listener of July 5, and found and reread his article in the Journal of Agriculture last October, with my own brief comment on it in The Listener a few days later, I had no recollection that I had trodden this ground before. Now all I can do is laugh at the size of the footmarks, which are unmistakably mine. I can’t even fall back on an ex pede Herculem argument. If I do someone is sure to shout ex pede asinum, I will return to the shivering sheep. Though I can’t repeat that wintershorn sheep probably give less wool in twelve months than sheep shorn in summer, and can’t suggest so confidently that winter shearing will soon be dropped -‘"soon" would now be dangerous-I can ask the experts to tell us more clearly why sheep alone of all domestic animals pay no price for misery. Mr Story’s team gave a clear, interesting, and what I find at present a convincing explanation of the milling advantage of shearing in August. I hope they will now give us the physiological advantage: tell us why a ewe produces as much milk when she is half dead with

cold as when she is comfortable and warm. If I understand the milling argument August shearing is recommended because hunger, pregnancy, and cold combine to make a break or thin place in the fibre about that time, and it is therefore better to cut the wool at that point than wait till the weak place has moved on. Are we to be asked to believe that what is bad for the wool is not bad for the milk or the meat? *

JULY 12

OW long does it take human beings to make a home? Not less, I think,

than a quarter of a century. If we are lucky enough to live as long as that under the same roof and on the same piece of ground we are likely to feel then that we belong to them and they to us. But I have not often seen it happen sooner. Because this is a young country, not yet settled down, most of us spend the first half of our lives on

the move, and then can’t make up our minds where home is. For that reason

home-making can be a confusing, and often a depressing, experience for many years., It may even be, and certainly often seems to be, a disadvantage to be so strongly attached to one place that all other places fail to bring us peace. Revolutionaries and reformers play periodically with the idea of socialising our emotions as well as our possessions and our ways of making a livelihood, and although it always comes in the end to the nonsense it has always been, I never see a child leaving home for the first day at school without feeling depressed. Nor do I often see men and women leaving their places of employment at the other end of their lives without wondering how successful they will be in taking root again somewhere else. We decide perhaps to move into the sun and think that all of us will move. But it may happen that the sun does not warm us when we arrive; that the heat and glow remain in the place we have left and can’t be carried with us; that our heads and our hearts stay in different places. Animals, because they have short memories and no power of reflection, adapt themselves to change more (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) quickly that we do, though everybody has known striking exceptions: the dog that will not settle down in six months, the cat that will creep back mile after mile to the familiar doorstep, the placer sheep, so affectionately described by Guthrie-Smith, that will not, and can not, leave the rock or bush or stump that was its refuge when its mother died and has been the focus of its life ever since. But I am not thinking of animals particularly at this moment. I am thinking of the friend who came to see me recently after 40 years of widowhood, who has had to move from town to town and room to room, from relative to relative and friend to friend, and does not now know whose home is hers. We are creatures of habit, of affections, of earthly attachments. Uproot us-as so many millions have been uprooted during the last 40 years-and where do we take root again? ~~ =~ -_

JULY 15

hea a T is good news, if it is true, that life is to be made rougher and tougher for the killers and eaters ‘of woodPigeons. Who they are many people know but will not, and perhaps should not, tell.. The killing goes on and will go on as long as the birds are easy to find, but not easy to reach from the more closely populated areas. If wood-

pigeons leit the bush and came to live in our gardens I think their numbers

would rise appreciably. But they cling, to remote places where poachers can destroy them without risk, and do destroy them in hundreds every year. In spite of all this, and in spite too of Guthrie-Smith’s melancholy forecast, pigeons *seem to be increasing slowly; but Ican’t understand why. They lay one egg only, and take a month to hatch it; feed the young bird for another month or six weeks; and are all the time exposed to danger from above or below. Though they do sometimes place the nest in difficult places to raid, I

have seen a nest so near to the ground that I had only to take one step up a bank to be on face level with it and less than a yard away. I can’t explain the increase to myself except by attributing | it to the pigeon’s hardi-. ness and its ability, in Guthrie-Smith’s words, to digest almost anything green. Since it can never be short of food in summer or winter, and in

autumn has more food of the best kind than it can possibly eat, the casualties are probably few, the breeding period long, and the life of individual birds perhaps long _ too. But if I were a pigeon myself and capable of reading the signs of the times I would leave the bush forever and start life over again in a garden city or leafy suburb. (To be continued)