Counting Sheep

by Philip Walling

  He did not know how or why a normal prion became folded into a malign shape, or how prions replicate themselves, or how these pathogens infect their victims, or why some animals are resistant and some completely immune, even though they have prions within their bodies. For example, an affected ewe can give birth by caesarean section, yet not pass on the disease to her lamb. But if the same ewe gives birth naturally the lamb is affected. It seems the disease can also be transmitted through milk or urine, but there is no practical test to diagnose scrapie in a live animal.

  The fear of silently growing forms of TSE was not allayed by our being told that prions were apparently resistant to all usual disinfectants, normal heat, ultra-violet and ionising radiation and even formalin. They could be destroyed by fire (if it was kept at 900°C for at least four hours) and heat combined with pressure for a certain period (as in a domestic pressure cooker). But for reasons not made clear, only one commercial disinfectant, ‘Environ LpH’, made by an American firm called Steris, was effective against them. They persisted so long in the soil that burying did not give full protection, which explains why farmers were prevented from burying dead animals on their own land.

  The EU made it compulsory in 2003 for farmers to notify DEFRA if they knew or suspected any of their flock had the disease. They were then given the choice of whether to become part of a genotyping scheme, coupled with selective culling of those sheep considered to be statistically at risk of developing the disease, or have their whole flock culled. The compensation is not attractive and would not encourage a flock owner to report himself to DEFRA. There was also a National Scrapie Plan, a voluntary nationwide sheep-testing scheme, which is now discontinued, designed to eradicate scrapie from the national flock by voluntary culling.

  However, on the basis of Prusiner’s theories and research hundreds of thousands of sheep (and cattle) were slaughtered and their carcases incinerated, even though they did not actually have any disease. They were simply judged to be statistically at risk of contracting one. The risk was assessed by researchers reading the genetic codes of 1,500 sheep that had developed scrapie and comparing them with the genetic codes of 14,000 unaffected British sheep. They found fifteen genotypes that contained the putative infectious prion (PrP) and worked out the likelihood of sheep developing scrapie by reference to the number of reported cases from each genetic code. They gave each of the fifteen PrP genotypes an RCAM figure, meaning ‘reported cases per annum per million sheep’.

  They found that most sheep which had died from scrapie had VRQ in their genetic makeup and concluded that the greatest risk was in sheep which had that in both parents’ genetic codes. They gave these an RCAM code of between 225 and 545 and all animals with that genetic code were slaughtered. The next most prevalent was a tenth of this at 37 RCAM and the next had an RCAM of 5. One posed such a low risk as to be negligible (0.7) and in the homozygous genotype (the same inheritance from both parents), ARR/are, there has never been any reported case in any sheep. This was the genotype of the 90,000-guinea Suffolk ram lamb sold in Stirling in 2011 and few Suffolk ram lambs with a different genotype would now stand much of a chance of making such a high price, or any price.

  But things are not as straightforward as they appear. For example, the risk is not constant and varies with the age of the sheep. In some genotypes the risk peaked at two years old, while in others it was three. In some other countries where they have sheep with PrP in their genetic code, no scrapie has been reported. Nor does the research explain the existence of at least twenty different types of scrapie that have been identified in the UK. In recent years atypical scrapie has been distinguished from classical scrapie. And the overwhelming majority of sheep – between 999,455 and 999,775 out of a million even in the highest risk category – do not develop scrapie. Why not? Even lambs born to a mother with the symptoms do not necessarily develop the disease.

  It became clear that to eradicate all scrapie from the national flock on the basis of statistical estimate of risk, as opposed to dealing with the disease as it appeared, it would have been necessary to slaughter a significant proportion of the nation’s sheep; some breeds would not have survived at all, and many hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of healthy sheep would have been slaughtered unnecessarily. This would not only have destroyed much of what the Rare Breeds Survival Trust has been trying to do since the 1970s, and achieved the extirpation of the Norfolk, which not even the great Coke could accomplish, but it would have destroyed a large part of our ovine genetic heritage without eradicating scrapie. It is therefore not surprising that the voluntary National Scrapie Plan was abandoned by breeders. On the other hand, it has been a good thing for Suffolk breeders because it allowed them to cleanse their breed of its greatest defect and set it fair for the future.

  As the Suffolk rose in the world, its maternal Norfolk line rapidly declined into penury and obscurity. In what was nearly its last hurrah, one Norfolk ram and five ewes were exhibited by a Mr Geoffrey Buxton in the ‘Extra Stock’ section at the Norfolk Show in 1887. This class at the end of the sheep lines was for amusing oddities and included ‘Six Egyptian Sheep bred by Prince Halim Pascha of Egypt’ and ‘A Two-shear Three-legged Sheep, bred by Mr Norton of Raynham’.

  By 1903 the last remaining animals had become an eccentric pursuit for the gentry. The same Mr Buxton showed three ewes at the Norfolk County Show, and the Eastern Daily Press reported they were ‘fenced in very high due to their being very active jumpers’. Prince Frederick Duleep Singh from Old Buckenham Hall showed a few, as did Russell Colman (of the mustard family). Colman’s was the last flock in Norfolk, but they were swept away by ‘the greatest flood ever known in Norfolk’ on 26 August 1912, when over seven inches of rain fell in twenty-four hours.

  Then in 1905, his grandfather having done all he could to rid Norfolk of the Norfolk, the Earl of Leicester at Holkham re-established a hobby flock of Norfolks, largely to avoid their extinction, but by 1917 this flock had also been dispersed. One Dermot McCalmont, who was probably the last breeder of the old Norfolk to keep a sizeable flock of about 100 ewes, gave a stuffed and mounted three-year-old ram to the Natural History Museum, where it is still preserved. And that was the end of the breed – or so it was feared.

  But there was one remaining flock of Norfolks in Suffolk, in the hands of James D. Sayer, a farmer, cattle dealer and grazier on quite a big scale. He had a small group comprising animals he had saved from extinction by gathering together the remnants of the last few flocks in Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. He kept them at Lackford, near Bury St Edmunds, until he died in 1954, aged ninety-two. Upon his headstone, at Shropham, are inscribed the words ‘His folds were full of sheep’. One of his rams and a ewe are preserved at the Norfolk Rural Life Museum at Gressenhall.

  By 1947 his flock was diminished to half a dozen ewes and three rams. They were becoming hopelessly inbred. The rams had developed cryptorchidism – had only one testicle – which is a recessive characteristic that comes out through in-breeding. And the ewes had become indifferent mothers, another consequence of in-breeding. The last survivors went to the Gene Bank of the Zoological Society of London at Whipsnade Zoo, where the last Norfolk ram was mated with the last seven Norfolk ewes. It was also mated with six Suffolk ewes, to try at least to preserve some of the Norfolk blood in a back-cross – because the lambs would be more than half Norfolk through the Suffolk’s ancestry. These were all transferred in 1968 to the National Agricultural Centre at Stoneleigh in Warwickshire, where the pure Norfolk ram drowned in a ditch in November 1971 before the staff had organised themselves to use the ram for breeding. When the last pure-bred female died in 1975, there remained only the cross-bred offspring from the Suffolk back-cross.

  The Norfolk’s extinction was not entirely in vain. It had the effect of highlighting the plight of many traditional breeds of domestic livestock and galvanising those who could see what we were about to lose to form the Rare Breeds Survival Trust in 1973. Many ancient breeds of livestock had
already been lost and more were in imminent danger during the dark decades in the middle of the twentieth century when there was little interest in preserving breeds that had outlived their commercial use and few understood that the traditional breeds were a genetic resource of irreplaceable value.

  Joe Henson (father of Adam Henson on BBC’s Country-file), Michael Rosenberg and Lawrence Alderson were founder members of the RBST and took the lead in re-creating a simulacrum of the Norfolk, the Norfolk Horn, from the cross-bred lambs out of the Suffolk. It is from these that the new Norfolk Horn is descended. This is not the same contemptible animal that Coke affected to despise, but a tamer version of the old indomitable breed.

  The rams of the resurrected Norfolk Horn are quick on their feet and impressively horned, but could hardly be described as agile or fierce. Admittedly the ewes are prolific, but they resemble nothing so much as Suffolks with horns. It remains to be seen whether the breed will find a role beyond the hobby-farming niche it currently occupies. The meat sells well through local butchers, especially as the carcase is fuller now than was the old Norfolk’s, due to the back-crossing with Suffolks that transports the influence of the Southdown. And, of course, they have been selected more for their carcase than either their wool or their capacity to endure hard-driving and the fold–course. There are nearly 3,000 registered animals in the Flock Book, which is impressive enough, but the increase in numbers only lifts it out of Category 1, ‘critical’, into Category 4, ‘at risk’, in the RBST’s register of endangered breeds.

  Many asked at the time, what was the point in re-creating the Norfolk when its raison d’être had gone more than a century earlier. If there had been a need for the breed it would have survived. Was sentimentality the motive for trying to resurrect it, especially in a form it never possessed? It is hard to give an answer to this, but it is hard not to feel that it would have been better, and rather magnificent, for it to have gone, like the doomed Highlanders after 1745, rather than be preserved, with its form separated from its function, like an exhibit in a museum.

  The description from 1866 entitled ‘Old Norfolk Farmer’, in Agriculture Ancient and Modern by Samuel Copeland, serves to remind us how magnificent they must have been, those true old Norfolk sheep:

  They are in their roving disposition quite equal to the heath sheep, and being longer in the legs and lighter in the carcase no common fence will stop them, and they have consequently given way to other breeds, as their native commons and heaths have been brought under cultivation. The writer has seen a flock of these sheep clear a fence with as much ease as a greyhound. The rams are sometimes very large and fierce, and are a match for any dog. At seven or eight years old they are nearly as tall as a good sized donkey, and their tremendous horns render them formidable antagonists.

  10

  THE HERDWICK

  The grand secret of breeding is to suit the breed to the soil and climate.’

  William Youatt, Cattle: Their Breeds, Management and Diseases, London 1835

  ALTHOUGH HYBRIDS GENERATE MUCH OF THE LAMB we produce for the table, and about a quarter of the national wool-clip, most of the over sixty of our native British breeds do not fully fi t into the classical sheep pyramid. Some are specialised lowland breeds, which have been created for a particular purpose, or have become uniquely adapted to their terrain, and others are mountain and upland breeds for which no satisfactory Longwool crossing sheep has been developed. One of these mountain breeds, the one that is closest to my heart, is the Herdwick, the native sheep of the Lakeland fells, and probably the toughest sheep in Britain.

  Herdwicks are one of the most passively subversive, semi-domesticated animals this side of the donkey. They appear to submit meekly to being fenced in, but their spirit is never broken by it. If they are happy in a field they will stay there, but it is always by consent. Their atavistic need for freedom is never far below the surface and if they decide they want to get out fences won’t hold them for long. Like prisoners of war, they remain alert to the slightest possibility of escape, always grazing with one eye on the gate waiting for someone to leave it open – a minute or two and a few inches is all they need to make a dash for it. Turn them into a field of fresh clean grass and just watch their antics. First they will inspect the boundaries of their enclosure by doing a tour, snatching at the tastiest green tips of grass as they go, searching for weak spots. If no escape route is immediately obvious they will retreat to within dashing distance of the gate and await their chance, all the while giving a plausible impression of being engrossed in the pleasure of the sweet pickings.

  I have often left Herdwick ewes, on an autumn evening, grazing conscientiously in what I believed to be a secure field, only to find next morning that the birds had flown. Sometimes there might be a few stragglers left – a forlorn remnant not agile enough to go over the top. Once they do get out they don’t hang about. They haven’t gone to the trouble of escaping just to linger in the next field, when the whole purpose was to make it back to the heaf on their home fell.

  Although most hill and mountain sheep have a strong homing instinct, Herdwicks have one of the strongest of all. They become attached to a piece of grazing ground on the open fell and if they have to leave it their instinct is to get back there as quickly as they can. Lambs learn it from their mothers, and it is quite common to find three or four, or more, generations of sheep grazing together on the same area of mountain. On hard hills, where the sheep grew slowly, females were not allowed to breed until they were big enough, usually in their third year. On some heafs there could be a ewe with the current year’s lamb and as many as five or six of her male and female offspring in regular ages from previous years.

  A Herdwick can assess the weakest part of a wall at a glance. It knows where it will rush (tumble down) if it runs at it, and which bits are slightly lower than the others. That’s why there is a ‘breast wire’, a single strand of wire, stretched tight, at just the right height near the top of nearly every drystone wall in the Lake District. It is to deflect the sheep back into the field when they try to jump over. Some clever Herdwicks use the breast wire to their advantage by running obliquely up the wall, squeezing behind the wire and bracing their backs against it with their feet on the stones, like climbers going up a rock chimney.

  There are tales of draft Herdwick ewes having been sold in the autumn sales in Broughton-in-Furness – in the far south of the Lake District – only to be gathered off their home heaf at the spring gather in late March. They had travelled forty or fifty miles, to get back home across all manner of country. There is a story of a police constable on night duty in Bowness-on-Windermere coming across a small troop of Herdwick ewes scurrying north through the dim streets on their way home to their heaf on the Kirkstone Fells.

  I once sold seven Herdwick gimmer hoggs to a solicitor who fancied himself as a farmer. I’d already told him his fences weren’t good enough, but he wouldn’t listen – being a lawyer, he knew best. I put them into his field one Monday evening and by Friday they were back in my field fifteen miles away. He came to collect them a few days later and assured me that his fences were now as secure as Alcatraz. ‘Not even Houdini could get out!’ he declared confidently as we loaded them back into his trailer. About ten days later he rang again to ask if I’d seen his hoggs. I hadn’t, and neither of us ever saw them again.

  The sexes are well defined. The ewes are polled and feminine, while the rams are strongly horned and decidedly masculine, often half as big again as the ewes, with a powerful chest supported by strong forelegs and standing higher at the shoulder than the rump. They should have a ruff of wool growing proud on their shoulders and nape of the neck, like a lion. They are all proud display while their ewes are busy and resourceful. The rams’ horns often grow to three curls and in older sheep sometimes grow into their faces if they are not trimmed or even removed altogether. This operation is usually performed with a hand-saw either by removing a curl or by taking a sliver from the inside of the horn w
here it has started growing against the face. As long as it is done carefully without cutting into the quick it is little different from cutting your toenails. There is a limited modern fashion for breeding ‘cowie’, or polled, rams, because their horns can cause injury both to them and to anyone working with them. But something of their essence is lost if the horns are bred off them, and in any case horns make such marvellous handles that the benefit of them outweighs any damage they might cause. The steel-grey, coarse, weatherproof outer wool overlies a softer, denser inner coat, and their legs and faces are clear, ‘hoar-frosted’ white, as the breed standard describes it. Any black spotting on the face and legs is deprecated, as is ‘yellow’ or brown anywhere on the animal.

  The usually single lamb is born in late April and May with a tight little astrakhan fleece, ranging in colour from light grey to black, with the best-bred being born jet-black with white ears. Their sturdy legs are proof of the saying that Herdwicks ‘make bone’. There is a practice on hard hill farms of sending the gimmer hoggs away for their first winter to the lowlands to get the best start in life. They do not compete with the older sheep for scarce winter grazing on the fells and grow into bigger sheep if they are fed better in their first year. Herdwicks from the northern part of Lakeland were traditionally walked to the mild coastal marshes on the Solway estuary, where there is seldom a frost and snow is virtually unknown. They would spend five months from 1 November to 1 April on the marshes and then be walked home and sent back to the fell, just as the older sheep were being brought down into the in-bye fields (enclosed fields round the farm) for lambing. Many dairy farmers took in hoggs to ‘top’ the grass to keep it from getting straggly during the winter, and have the benefit of the ‘golden hoof’ without having a flock of sheep competing with their dairy herd during the grazing season.