When we first got Agnes, our pet sheep, I attempted to Google up information on keeping sheep as pets. There ain’t a lot out there.

Most of the so-called “pet sheep” I found online are merely the favorites of a sheep farmer’s children, singled out for pethood amongst a flock otherwise destined for the table.

On the other hand, I found lots of pet goat websites. The common perception — oft repeated on many pet goat websites — appears to be that sheep are terminally stupid, whereas goats are quite bright.

I’d thought this myself.

Until I met Agnes.

Among Agnes’s achievements:

1. She can actually HERD horses, gathering them up and herding them back into their stalls. I’d heard of sheep being herded but not of sheep DOING the herding. And, she’ll do it on command. “Agnes, go round up the horses” — and off she goes. After a job well done, she’s so proud of herself that she does her little victory dance, bouncing around the yard sideways, nodding her head up and down. This is not the action of a stupid animal.

2. She’s got a pretty wide vocabulary of people-speak.: The number of words / phrases she understands is at least as large as that of most dogs, exceeded only by April, the hyper-smart collie who is smarter than a lot of people. She can also pick context out of an entire sentence, not just commands. She understands her name and the words/concepts “mommy”, “daddy”, dogs, cats, horses, dinner, inside, outside, good, bad, love, scratch / itch, grain, treats, Frosties (her favorite treat – more about this later), diaper, as well as being able to pick out each of the dogs and cats by name, and at least two of the horses.

3. She lived indoors as a lamb, until we were sure she’d be safe outside on her own. As a result, she got good at solving a lot of mechanical problems like (a) how to open drawers (b) how to raid the pantry (c) how to open the dogs’ treat cupboard and make herself VERY popular with the dogs (c) how to knock on the door to get let in. She’s figured out how the front doorknob works but can’t twist it with her mouth and can’t figure out how to open it with her hooves. She keeps trying but not having thumbs frustrates her as much as it does the dogs and cats. However, she’s very good at spotting when the door isn’t firmly latched and opening the door to get in.

Sheep Ain’t So Dumb After All:

A recent study done by the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, England tested sheep on their ability to recognize human faces. See article, “Was Your Meat Smarter than Your Pet?” on ABCNews.com The sheep tested got 50 out of the 50 faces right, which puts them right up there in the intelligence league with pigs and monkeys.

A lot of the bad rap that sheep get for not being thought particularly clever has to do with the fact that their herding instincts are stronger than a lot of other herd animals. When sheep are in a herd, they tend to copy what everyone else is doing. However, the same can be said about teenagers, and that doesn’t make them stupid — just impressionable. Every now and then one reads about 400 sheep committing mass suicide jumping off a cliff. All it takes is a couple of sheep in the front who get into panic mode to the point that that supercedes any rational thought and whammo, stampede. The rest of the flock is going over that cliff. It must suck to be one of the middle sheep – there’s not a lot you can do about the situation. (hey, all the other kids are doing it!)
When sheep are in a herd, they tend to copy what everyone else is doing.

However, the same can be said about teenagers, and that doesn’t make them stupid — just impressionable.

Goats, on the other hand, are generally less flock-dependent and therefore thought smarter. However, my theory is that a lot of this depends on environment rather than heredity. Just as a normallly timid (sheepish) sheep might shy away from humans, sheep that are bottle fed by people and kept as pets grow up friendly, outgoing and confident. Sheep that grow up wth dogs as their friends and playmates are always going to think of them as playmates and colleagues, not a fearsome creature who is going to herd them around.

Therefore, if a sheep is raised under conditions where her or she has constant intellectual stimuli, constant opportunities to make decisions and solve problems for herself, she’s going to end up being a pretty smart sheep.

This, I believe, is the case with Agnes, although if she didn’t have the native intelligence in the first place, her environment wouldn’t have done her that much good.

Agnes’ Multi-Species Flock:

Ever since she arrived at Cleydael at the impressionable age of 2 months, Agnes’ friends and companions have been people, dogs, cats and horses. From an early age, she’s therefore had a chance to learn a lot about the body language and behavior of a number of different species and figure out how to fit in socially with all of them.

Most of the time, she acts like the fourth dog. She runs around in the yard and plays with the two younger boy dogs, or she sits on the porch and hangs out with April, the middle aged collie. When the pizza delivery lady drives down our driveway, she gets greeted by three dogs and one sheep. The four of them scamper down the driveway to meet her car and escort her in, dancing their “happy dance” the whole while.

The main difference is that dogs are thinking “oh boy, pizza!” while Agnes is thinking “oh boy, cardboard box!” (Sheep like messing with cardboard every bit as much as goats do.)

The bus tours are always astonished to be greeted by Agnes, who is gregarious rather than “sheepish.” If anything, she’s a watch-sheep, alerting us when anybody comes onto the property and then checking them out.

While she’s figured out how to run with the dogs and fit in as one of the pack, she fits in equally well with the three cats. She knows which ones she has to be gentle with and which ones welcome a bit of roughhousing. Victoria, the middle cat, is the smallest of the bunch. Little Vee has a whole host of health problems, resulting from the vet having miscalculated the dosage on her anasthetic when she was neutered. This resulted in minor brain damage which stunted her growth and messed up her balance and coordination. The brave little soul soldiers on, and Agnes seems to understand Vee’s limitation and is “gentle as a lamb” with her. On the other hand, Albert who arrived in August as a mere kitten and is now larger than Victoria is all boy and likes to play rough. Agnes senses that and the two of them have some wild games of tag.

She’s also figured out the horses. Not only can she herd them, she has also made good friends with Mariah, my Arabian mare. Mariah is by far the smartest of the horses. She can damn near do algebra, she’s so bright. But, she’s at the bottom of the alpha mare pecking order. This bothers her sometimes, as she was here first and USED to be the alpha mare. But mostly her attitude is that of a smart, slightly nerdy, slightly artsy high school girl who broadly doesn’t care if she’s not in the cheerleader clique or not. For those Noggin channel watchers, Mariah is basically the Daria of the horse world.

Agnes has a little foam rubber bed outside Mariah’s stall window where she goes and just hangs out with Mariah. Becoming fluent in the body language of a fellow prey animal species is easier of course than learning carnivore body language. Horses are reknowned for getting along with goats, so why not sheep? These two are great friends.

Hell, for all I know, they’re discussing the great books. (forgive my tendency to anthromophosize, but they are awfully smart critters….)

Agnes’ Film & TV Career:

Agnes almost didn’t get to be a pet sheep at all. At the tender (in all senses of the word) age of six weeks, she was destined for the meat market. She’d even been reserved in somebody’s name as their Easter dinner. However, a chance at television stardom intervened and saved her life. Ironically, the part she was cast for was as a sacrificial lamb — in National Geographic’s “Mysteries of the Bible”. The animal wrangler, Jodi Nolan, needed a pure white baby lamb and the breed of sheep she keeps (Tunis) are brown when they are babies, so she called some local farming contacts and came up with Agnes. I agreed to adopt her when the shoot was over. It apparently took three shampoos to get the stage blood out of her wool. Otherwise, she’d have been the pink sheep of the family. But better stage blood than real blood.

Food for Thought: Sparing a Thought for Those Who Become Our Food.

Having a sheep as a pet has gotten me to swear off eating lamb. I’ve only had lamb once since acquiring Agnes and it made me queasy. Nowadays, I’d just as soon “wok my dog” as eat a sheep. And I don’t buy lamb and rice dog food anymore either. No sense in giving the dogs a taste for one of their siblings.

Knowing how smart and affectionate cows and particularly pigs can be, I am resisting ever getting either. I know what the outcome would be and I like ham and beef far too much. I’d rather not be on a first-name basis with my dinner. The creepy old goat lady in “Cold Mountain” is not who I want to be when I grow up.

Call me a hypocrite, but this double standard is what happens when a suburbanite moves to the sticks and becomes a hobby farm owner. I was raised on meat, shrink-wrapped and packaged so that its connection with a formerly living being was easy to forget.

However, the basic inequity of the situation between meat animals and “pet” animals is disturbing, to someone who has a “meat animal” as a beloved pet. For example, when I buy sheep medicine at Tractor Supply, it says on the packaging, “Do not administer within 21 days of slaughtering.” None of my dog or cat medicines say that. Imagine reading, “Do not give your kitten this wormer if it’s getting near time to kill her”. Ewww.

Neither do any of the preparations for the horses. Even though a goodly chunk of Continental Europe happily patronizes their local “Chevaline”, the average American or Briton is disturbed by the idea.

I’m not suggesting that people shouldn’t eat horse meat, or mutton or lamb. Or meat. I’m not turning this into a vegan activist blog.

I like vegetarian food but I’m not a vegetarian. To me, it’s a cuisine, not a lifestyle choice. I like Thai food too, and I’m not Thai.

Instead, this is an appeal to fellow carnivores for more humane treatment of our brother creatures who are going to become someone’s dinner and to help encourage the market demand in the US for so-called “cruelty free meat” like there is in the UK.

Knowing that sheep are intelligent, kindly, affectionate, sentient beings should at least argue for their humane treatment.

OK, there is really no such thing as “cruelty free meat” as the whole food chain is inherently cruel. This is one of life’s basic facts, whether we’re talking about natural predators or human consumption.

However, there is at least “torture free meat”.

And consumers should create more market demand for it in the US, like there is in Britain. When I lived in England, I made it a practice to buy free range chickens and eggs and humanely slaughtered meat, or wild game killed in its natural habitat, free from the trauma of the abbatoir. This was available in all the chain grocery stores – Sainsburys, Tesco, Waitrose, etc, whereas in the US it’s still a “fringe” health food store product, available in places like Freshfields but not your local supermarket. But if there’s more consumer demand, the market will respond.

Some of the practices of the meat industry are pretty horrific, with “fallers” (sheep that were too weak to stand up in the truck) dumped on a pile of dead animals, for example. And as for horses, there are plenty of websites exposing the horrors of live animal export. And “Fast Food Nation” will probably put some people off their burgers….

Maybe if more people get to know Agnes, she can be a bit of an ambassador for her species and get people thinking that “sheep are folks too”. That would not be a ba-a-a-ad thing at all for all those nice little sheep that don’t get to be somebody’s pet like the lucky Miss Agnes.

Stay tuned for more about keeping sheep as pets….