Britain's Loneliest Sheep

November 5, 2023 12:46 PM

Two years ago, a kayaker saw a sheep on a beach at the bottom of cliffs on the north-east coast of Scotland. Jillian Turner said "She saw us coming and was calling to us along the length of the beach following our progress until she could go no further". Turner kayaked the route again recently, saw the sheep again and went to the media for help. The sheep has been rescued by a group of farmers, including The Hoof GP and TheSheepGame. They posted a video about it. Since then, the sheep (Fiona), has been moved to a secret location after activists protested.

For more about the area, here is a blog post. And for bonus sheep content, here are (Scottish) sheep being sheared.

posted by paduasoy (30 comments total)

Poor Fiona/Sheepy! I hope she has company wherever she ends up.
posted by the primroses were over at 12:56 PM on November 5, 2023

awww I'm very happy to hear that Fiona has been rescued from her loneliness. I hope she has some sheepy friends around her now.
posted by supermedusa at 1:02 PM on November 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh wow! I bet she enjoyed her first shearing after that! Her fleece must have been long as hell, matted, and extremely painful!

Watching the vid now - I hope the farmers filmed her after :)
posted by esoteric things at 1:17 PM on November 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm so happy for the sheep, and I hope the rest of her days will be boring and happy with many friends of her own species, and maybe even future babies.

But also: yo! there are several wars, a global climate crisis, a global biodiversity crisis and authoritarians getting closer to power in the US and many other countries. I can't even list all that is wrong. And you guys are fighting over a ewe? A ewe that has now been saved? Proportions, anyone?
posted by mumimor at 1:19 PM on November 5, 2023 [7 favorites]

The sheep on the island of North Ronaldsay, in Orkney, subsist on a diet largely consisting of sea-weed which is claimed to reduce the methanity of their burps. Wondering now if Fiona developed a taste independently.

I'm quite the fanboy of Cammy Wilson's Sheep Game: all sorts of clever tech for recording info on each sheep electronically as they are processed. Me, I go out >3 times a day to count the legs on our sheep: if it's N=60 I know that none of our 15 ewes have died.

Proportions, anyone? "Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only count to fourteen" Ed Burke.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:27 PM on November 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

esoteric things, the BBC article I linked as "moved to a secret location" has a picture of her shorn.
posted by paduasoy at 1:28 PM on November 5, 2023

Glad she was rescued, I don't think she would even know she was a "spectacle", especially after her 15 minutes have expired.

Dog and I have the pleasure of passing a group of sheepies every mid-day walk, though their numbers are mysterious. First time in this pasture (they normally live out of sight of the road) I counted nine, then a day or two later it was ten, for a few days. Then it was nine again for a week and now it's eight! No cliffs nearby. Maybe Abby the horse, in the adjacent paddock, is up to something. Gotta say for a sheep dog Mr Border Collie is remarkably uninterested and can't be bothered to worry about the count.
posted by maxwelton at 2:22 PM on November 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

Oh! my sheep dog mutt can't even see sheep from the car without wanting to herd them. Some farmers worry he will harm them, but that isn't even at the very far back of his mind. He only likes cooked food, and food that is cooked by the wolf: the remains the wolf keeps in his lair, that are rotting a bit. The wolf is friends with a lot of other dogs in the neighborhood, but not mine.
posted by mumimor at 3:06 PM on November 5, 2023

And our Border Collie is afraid of sheep, which is very handy when walking in the country. Tennis balls, on the other hand...
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 3:14 PM on November 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

I didn't know tennis balls weren't afraid of sheep.
posted by krisjohn at 4:51 PM on November 5, 2023 [11 favorites]

I saw this on the BBC earlier today the rescuers were scaling the side of a very very steep hillside that fell down into the water and rocks. It looked very dangerous trying to get this sheep, and I wondered why they just didn’t bring and release a couple new female sheep to give her company and leave it at that. I could’ve even shorten her right there before leaving.
posted by waving at 5:32 PM on November 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

My heart bled for the poor sheep, trying to follow the humans and get a rescue.

I second "Proportions, anyone?" big time, though. Come on, people.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:40 PM on November 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

Didn’t we have a post about a traditional practice, perhaps from Iceland, of marooning a lamb on a cliff ledge with abundant and luxuriant grass and then coming back to retrieve it after the lamb had grown and fattened?

The point was that such a lamb had very exceptionally tender meat because it didn’t get any exercise.

As I recall, it was typically a project of young men who climbed the cliff with the lamb slung around their neck, and then when they came back to get it, it was too heavy to carry back down, of course, so they pushed it off the ledge and collected the carcass at the base of the cliff to be carried back and butchered.

I suppose you could do the same thing with a beach completely isolated by rocky headlands even at the lowest tide as long as there was seaweed for it to eat, and if that was what was going on with Fiona, the sheep the kayaker saw two years ago was probably a predecessor.

And there might be a person out there who could lay claim to Fiona, but I presume they would now be too sheepish to come forward.
posted by jamjam at 8:38 PM on November 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

I presume they would now be too sheepish to come forward

I was looking for a pun, instead going to give up saying it bleats me.
posted by k3ninho at 10:32 PM on November 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

I see what ewe did there.
posted by krisjohn at 11:23 PM on November 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

Silly question time: What, if anything, are sheep able to do about their own overgrown fleeces when there's no farmer around to care for them?
posted by Paul Slade at 12:15 AM on November 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

This was running at the end of every Sky News hour yesterday, with a certain amount of bemused emphasis on the importance of the story. This after 58 minutes of Hamburg airport kidnapping, Middle East nightmare, Ukraine nightmare, British politics as usual (nightmare), AI nightmare &c.

I think Fiona may have been Sky's 20 minutes of adorable puppies for the day.
posted by chavenet at 12:49 AM on November 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

I was looking for a pun, instead going to give up saying it bleats me.

You've not given up at all, stop trying to pull the wool over our eyes.
posted by Dysk at 1:07 AM on November 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Silly question time: What, if anything, are sheep able to do about their own overgrown fleeces when there's no farmer around to care for them?

Primitive sheep shed their fleece in spring. It's a trait that's been bred out of commercial sheep breeds, and then bred back in again and marketed to farmers as EasyCare now that wool doesn't have a lot of value.
posted by Rhedyn at 1:21 AM on November 6, 2023 [11 favorites]

And there might be a person out there who could lay claim to Fiona, but I presume they would now be too sheepish to come forward.

The farmer who owns Fiona was aware she was there but couldn't safely rescue her himself. He was actively involved with the rescue team.
posted by Rhedyn at 1:23 AM on November 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

As I recall, it was typically a project of young men who climbed the cliff with the lamb slung around their neck, and then when they came back to get it, it was too heavy to carry back down, of course, so they pushed it off the ledge and collected the carcass at the base of the cliff to be carried back and butchered.

I wonder if you are thinking of Lítla Dímun?, filthy light thief made a post about it some years ago. No sheep are pushed over ledges, though.
posted by mumimor at 2:33 AM on November 6, 2023

NYT article on this. Says she's named Fiona because there was a previous sheep in a similar situation named Shrek.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:36 AM on November 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Cammie (theSheepGame) is also a presenter on the Scottish farming programme “Landward” - seen here learning how to spread manure.. I’d recommend the show to anyone visiting the country and looking for more unusual places to visit or stuff to eat.
posted by rongorongo at 2:52 PM on November 6, 2023

FWIW the one guy involved in the rescue is The Hoof GP - he has a YouTube channel with ca. 2 million subscribers where he (mostly) shows himself treating various animal hooves that are overgrown to a greater or lesser degree.

I will confess to wasting some considerable amount of time watching hoof trimming. It's one of those things that most of us have never even heard of, yet is fascinating to the nth degree. Typical sample - a dairy cow with massively overgrown hooves being trimmed up.
posted by flug at 1:48 PM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

I hope that the sheep has been put somewhere safe. However, it did belong to a farmer somewhere - does he get a chance to reclaim his sheep at some point, I wonder??
posted by EwesmyBaby at 5:02 AM on November 8, 2023

it did belong to a farmer somewhere - does he get a chance to reclaim his sheep at some point, I wonder??

The farmer who owned her was actively involved in organising her rescue, and once she was rescued he transferred ownership of her to Dalscone Farm which is able both to take good care of her and to handle the media attention. He did not want to deal with the media and the aggressive activists. It was a good solution in my opinion.
posted by Rhedyn at 11:26 AM on November 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Fiona's fleece is to be sold with proceeds going to an animal charity. - this article mentions, cutely, that Fiona got her name in honour of Shrek - a New Zealand sheep that went AWOL for 6 years and spent the time growing a 27Kg fleece which was eventually used to make 20 men's suits.
posted by rongorongo at 3:03 AM on November 10, 2023

Everyone loves sheep and everyone loves stories of derring-do – why can’t we have both? First Dog on the Moon
posted by mumimor at 6:50 AM on November 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

There's a longer (~20 mins) video of the rescue now. You get a very good sense of the terrain, and it's nice to watch knowing it all ends well.
posted by gladly at 6:54 PM on November 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

I loved the rescue video. I grew up on a farm in Scotland. It is a world where there are few problems you can't attempt to solve with a winch, some baler twine, a certain amount of brawn and some intermittent jokes. Noting here how Fiona got the £400 climbing rope for her rescue while the guys are clambering up and down the cliff with no gloves, helmets or caribeeners - just some kind of knotted nylon monstrosity rope found in the back of a barn.

If you are interested in the score the SSPCA man gave Fiona for fitness - here is an explanation.
posted by rongorongo at 11:19 PM on November 14, 2023 [3 favorites]