The truth about sheep ..... and the story of a stubbornly virginal ewe

New Zealand and sheep are synonymous - and the Aussies love to make sheep jokes at our expense.  However it is a little known fact that sheep are amongst the most intelligent of animals.
   A university - not in NZ - conducted an experiment putting various mammals through a maze - and the sheep learned the route through the maze faster than any other animal - not so dumb huh!

People think all sheep look the same - but when you work with them you see each face is different and they have unique personalities - as you will see from my story :-)
    

When I was young I spent my school holidays on a sheep farm which is where I learned to love sheep. During lambing season there were always lambs whose mothers had rejected them - and we would bring them into the house and put them by the old wood range to keep them warm and we'd feed them cows milk every couple of hours. When they were big enough they would go and live in the home paddock by the house, so we could keep an eye on them as we weaned them off the bottles of milk. They would then be added back to the flock when they were older.

However, one lamb called Sally didn't believe she was a sheep and always kept herself apart from the rest of the flock and would run helter-skelter to any human who was near, bleating in outrage that she was locked in with these awful  woolly beasts. Time passed and when it came time for tupping (putting a ram into the flock for mating), she would firmly reject the ram's advances and back her rump into the fence corner and keep herself inaccessible and pure. She stubbornly did this all her life. We of course renamed her Virginnia.