Silly, silly sheep

22:30 5 February 2009

Even once again, I am amazed at the incredible stupidity of most domesticated animals. I should have gotten used to them by now, but they keep inventing new ways to prove how stupid they are. Today I helped my host mother out for several hours as we got a sizable snowfall and we needed to shovel the entire yard, inside court, and driveway in front of our house. In addition to this, we had the daily tasks of feeding and watering the animals- at this point we have about twenty five sheep including probably ten lambs, two cows, three geese, maybe twenty chickens, our dog (unfortunately all of her puppies died ), and our gorgeous cat that I named Sasha- more on this later. Regardless, in our house work I was watering the cows and sheep- they drink a lot and we have to get all the water from a calonka-, a public free flowing faucet, on our street with buckets. The process was two bucketed as I left one to fill while I brought the other to dump in the large watering pan in the sheep’s enclosure. The stupidity started well before this however, somehow our dog got loose (no danger with this one, she is a real sweetheart) and was running around terrorizing the sheep, geese, and chickens and enjoying her temporary freedom. Regardless, while the geese handled the pressure reasonably well and skirted out of her way relatively gracefully, and the chickens did surprisingly effective flight maneuvers to avoid her jaws, the sheep, as usual, took the crown for most hilarious/stupid behavior. In addition to once again running full tilt into a chain link fence and then crumbling, which I could at least understand somewhat, they also ran full tilt into the wooden fences and then got their heads wedged between slats- something only the dumbest of the dumb could do (though I can’t really talk about that one- ask my mom about me in Disneyland for a laugh sometimes). I digress, the final stunt I viewed was when I was bringing the water into the enclosure. Acting as though they were literally dying of thirst, the normally skittish animals tried to mount me to get the water so I had to carry it high. As soon as I started pouring, the animals rushed to get their heads in the trough and usually completely obscured the path of the water into the pan in the process. This resulted in the sheep getting a heedful of water, reacting to that shock, and then wondering why there was no water in the pan (usually only about 50% of the water found its goal, the rest was diverted to the ground or onto my pants by sheep heads). Regardless the expression of dual confusion/upset on the sheep’s behalf was priceless as they looked up after sticking their head into a flowing stream of water and wondered why they were now wet. Priceless.