Oct 284 min read

What Are The Sheep For?

Updated: Oct 29

Sam Bliss, volunteer shepherd for the Rock Point community flock

The Rock Point sheep greet me each time I arrive. They recognize the squeal of my bicycle’s front brake. “Baaaa,” they bleat at me while I dismount. They stare me down as I walk toward their enclosure, wherever I happen to have fenced them yesterday. Thalia, the flock mother, leads the group to me. They know I am their shepherd.

I’m told they greet others, too. Bart, the big extrovert, approaches most human strangers. Thalia’s daughter Thistle has come to appreciate cuddles and back-scratches. Passersby enjoy moments of connection with the flock. The sheep save their insistent demands — move us to new pasture now, dear shepherd — mostly for me.

People who encounter the flock and me ruminating together in the field often ask me what they are for. “Sheep! Cute! Why?”

When I first proposed keeping sheep to the board of Rock Point Commons, I wrote that the sheep would be for maintaining the peninsula’s open, unforested fields without loud, polluting, fossil-powered machinery. A living replacement for the lawnmower and the brush hog.

The flock is also for feeding us. We humans cannot eat grass, but sheep can, and we can eat them. When local lamb or mutton displaces other meat in our diets, Rock Point’s grassy meadows then displace some small portion of our demands on distant landscapes of corn and soy that nourish the animals whose commodified flesh becomes our own through eating.

The sheep have also proven somewhat useful for eating poison ivy. We could probably count their calming companionship as a use, too. The image of their handsome fleece-lined bodies grazing under solar panels, with the bright-orange blaze of fall maples in the background, probably serves some marketing use for Rock Point as well. And if the flock becomes a fixture on this land, they will provide wool each spring, and thus they will be for keeping people warm as hats and sweaters. These sheep are multifunctional.

Yet focusing on their usefulness might miss the point. The meat and the mowing and the fiber and the beauty and the anxiety alleviation and the removal of unwanted species are all fabulous, but what is special about keeping sheep at Rock Point is not those functions themselves; rather, it is co-creating relationships with the animals who offer these gifts. I care more about cultivating that intimate, interspecies interdependence than I do about the strictly instrumental value of the sheep.

Then again, perhaps we should embrace the reality that the sheep are for something — that they provide useful things to us.

I have trouble loving myself when I’m not useful. I bet you do too. Such is life in a culture that worships production. But with the sheep, it’s the reverse: I am sometimes uneasy about appreciating their usefulness. I deeply love these living beings whose roasted flesh I’m going to quite literally serve on a platter to my community. My stomach feels two ways about this (yum and yuck, in short). Wouldn’t it be easier if they were just pets?

Sure. The sheep could just be for greeting us with bleating, for producing warm fuzzy feelings via woolly snuggles.

But the sheep serve another, deeper purpose — one more thing they are for — that we would lose if we did not slaughter and consume them.

At my day job, I research how homegrown and wild-harvested foods contribute to people’s food security (or not) in this part of the world. When I ask gardeners, hunters, and homesteaders about how producing some of their own food interacts with their food security, they often mention the possibility that one day there will not be food on the shelves at the grocery store. Such a shortage may come to pass because of extreme weather or economic breakdown, or because we finally decide that the convenient cheapness of industrial farming and food manufacturing just isn’t worth the enormous damage it inflicts on the inhabitants of faraway places—from forests to farm workers, cornfields, and factory-farmed cattle.

Whatever the cause, the day the food runs out at Hannaford is on folks’ minds. On that day, it will be of service that we’ve kept sheep around here. Raising ruminant animals helps us maintain, and even rebuild, the skills we need to coax calories from the landscape. From this landscape.

It’s not just about how we produce food, but also how we distribute it. The sheep give recklessly: meat, wool, and landscape maintenance for anyone ready to receive it, with no transaction or contract. Following their example, we might relearn how to circulate these gifts as, well, gifts. When there’s no food at the store, I sure hope we are practiced in the art of letting food flow toward need, instead of deeming it “mine” or “ours” and distributing it via the hostage situation we call a market transaction: you give me the money, I’ll give you the food.

In short, these sheep grant us the opportunity to practice non-market foodways. Untracked generosity and eating from the land are worthwhile habits to foster even if the supermarkets do somehow manage to supply us with their packaged foodlike substances uninterruptedly forever.

The Rock Point sheep came to us from the Gift Flock at Sand River Community Farm on the other side of the broad lake, in Keeseville, New York. They are called the Gift Flock because nothing from their bodies is sold. I received them as a gift. I, in turn, offer my labor as a shepherd to Rock Point as a gift. Dozens of accomplices have joined me in that work. The sheep set off a chain of giving. Maybe that’s what they were here for all along.