The audacious Bo Peep

Bo Peep was supposedly an orphan lamb, but when I got to know her I realised she simply wanted a better life. She’d been a day or so old and bursting with good health when – bleating her heart out - she followed us along the farm road. We installed her in a large cardboard box in the living room, but soon her bleating drove us crazy.

After a local ’sheep psychologist’ determined she was lonely, we found a companion – a tiny boy lamb who had been deserted by his mother and two siblings. He fiercely stamped his feet in what was, apparently, a move to make us back off.  We were very intimidated and named him Stamp.

Bo Peep, meanwhile, learned to jump out of her box and soon resided in the laundry lined with newspaper and hay. I was so impressed with her assertiveness I considered taking notes so I could incorporate her more effective behaviours into my own life, but went off the idea on the day she escaped. The farmer found her standing on the living room couch cheerfully peeing. She was unperturbed by the hissing television she’d turned on when she stood on the remote.

For a while Bo Peep and Stamp spent their days in the quad trailer crate on our lawn, then I herded them into the house paddock where they camped in the mud by the gate and refused to eat grass.

It rained.  The mud turned to sludge. When they wouldn’t shift onto clean grass, we allowed the cold, sopping, grubby lambs to graze the house section where, to our annoyance, they dined on flowers, strawberry plants and the grapevine.

Next we put them in the paddock in front of the house but, after four failed attempts to block their exits, we surrendered and let them graze the section again.

That was when Bo Peep showed her true colours – she wasn’t so much a self confident lamb as an impudent and audacious one.  She’d leap onto the day bed on the terrace, bounce on the mattress and bound off.  She became addicted to this and got Stamp in on the act.

The pair spent much of their time gazing at the countryside from the comfort of the day bed. As they also did the ‘nature’ thing, I figured it was high time to lamb proof a paddock. Armed with kitchen scissors and flexing my muscles, I dragged out a roll of fencing mesh that had been buried under kikuyu grass for a decade or so.  I used electric fence standards to hold it up.

“Phwoar!!” said the farmer when he saw my handiwork.  “I didn’t realise you were such a big strong girl.”

I smiled coyly and didn’t mention that scissors are great for cutting kikuyu.

Life returned to normal until two more newborn lambs, the weakest triplets from hoggets who were going to struggle with so many offspring, showed up. Toru (named for Tahi, Rua, Toru . . . one, two, three in Maori) liked to sniff flowers when she was given the chance, while Freckles followed me everywhere, even when she had a full tummy. Like all pet lambs, they were really cute and adorable - for a while.