Capri 2022-2025
Monday, January 20th, 2025
Friday January 17 was the day appointed for the harvest, that is, the slaughter, of my favorite sheep of the flock. Savannah, our wheelchair-bound student in Therapeutic Horticulture, gave her this name and I always preferred it, but she was officially known as Maple. I made no objection to the choice of sacrificial lamb, affirming the need to regard our animals as livestock rather than pets in order to maintain the semblance of an agricultural enterprise and to recoup a portion of the expense of breeding and feeding them. There was also the value of their hides for wool rugs and for me, otherwise a confirmed vegetarian, the opportunity to eat the most delicious meat I’d ever come across and share it with others on festive occasions.
Unlike the farm’s true pet sheep, Tucker, who was bottle fed from birth and raised as a 4H project by a young girl in Paso intending to sell her at the 2020 County Fair but adopted out to us after the Fair was cancelled by COVID, Capri was never halter broken and like the others, only controllable when following Tucker, who would go wherever his shepherd or shepherdess led.
Whenever I approached Capri’s corral or pasture with a friendly greeting, she’d join the others in turning and walking away. But if I came in, sat down on an upturned bucket and played my recorder for a few minutes, she’d shyly approach and then nose up to me for some closed-eye skritchy-scratchy followed by stroking on her cheeks and chin.