The Good Life
One recent Saturday afternoon, I took the first steps in my quest to become a sheep.
I am not the first person to have had a hankering to live as another sort of animal. Some years ago, British designer and writer Thomas Thwaites joined a herd of goats in the Swiss Alps and pretended to be one for nearly a week.
To fit in, he pretended to eat grass. Humans can’t digest grass, because we don’t have a rumen. A rumen (hence ruminants) is what cows, sheep and goats have to allow them to digest grass. It functions as a giant fermentation vat, which is pretty cool. Thwaites had a fake rumen attached to his human stomach. He would spit the grass he had grazed on into this fake stomach, thus possibly fooling his new goat mates into believing he really was a goat. He also had an exoskeleton of a goat and a strange helmet that was supposed to look like a goat’s head, but didn’t.
We have no way of knowing whether the goats were fooled. He had wanted to have a go at being a goat because, he surmised, goats do not suffer from angst. The idea of escaping from angst, that curse of being a human animal, is an enticing one. But the angst, of course, travelled to the Swiss
Alps with him. He worried that the goats didn’t seem to like him. He was frightened of their horns. But then a lady goat took a fancy to him and he believes they became friends.
This doesn’t seem at all fanciful to me; most of my best friends are ruminants.
On that Saturday afternoon, I went with my friend Janet, who lives just around the bend, to a workshop on foraging. Greg called it scavenging.
He asked if we were going to go dumpster diving on our next outing. The workshop was run by the delightfully named Felicity Joy, who was wearing a fabulous woolly jumper. Her workshops are called “Foraging for Wild Edible Weeds”, but she also turns weeds into botanical skincare potions and uses leaves to tie-dye clothing. She has lovely hair, as woolly as her jumper. I said, to nobody in particular, that Felicity Joy would be a marvellous name for a sheep. “That’s not very nice,” said somebody. Not nice? Pah. Naming a sheep after somebody is the greatest of compliments. I never name my sheep after people I dislike, but this rather limits my choices, because the list of people I dislike is long and the sheep are numerous.
Thwaites had wanted to have a go at being a goat because, he surmised, goats do not suffer from angst.
W e stopped to say hello to a goat on our way home. His name was Christopher. He was a jolly-looking fellow, black and white, with a stubby, waggly tail and one black horn and one white. He said hello back. This conversation set off the dogs at the farmhouse, and we shouted an apology to the woman who appeared on the porch. We had just stopped to say hello to the goat, we said. “Oh, come and meet him,” she said.
We went into the paddock. Christopher wagged his tail some more and leapt about, pirouetting madly and joyously. We met Susan the cow, also black and white, who adopted Christopher after he was rescued from the roadside. We had a good romp, then off he went. He was busy. He was eating, with relish, an assortment of weeds. I might ask if I can take him to the next edible weedforaging workshop. I have an inkling he might find chickweed more to his liking than it was to mine. l