Mosaic: A Life in Pieces

His tail had been docked and his testicles banded off as part of an industry practice known as “marking”. Routine procedures that would provoke outrage and prosecution if he were a puppy or a kitten, and not a lamb.

When he was found, there was little left but bone and breath. His small body, once covered in soft wool and his mumma’s care, had been overtaken by flystrike. It had eaten into him and burned his skin, leaving patches so raw you could still feel the heat. And where wool no longer grew, pain had taken hold.

He was a patchwork of wounds and survival. A mosaic.

And so, his name found him.

But what remains most remarkable is not what has happened to Mosaic, but what has not been taken.

Perhaps it is our soft voices, or the treat we hold, but he inches his way towards us. Though there is caution in his step, there is curiosity in his eyes, and this gives us hope that he has not lost his.

And beside him, almost always now, is Mr Penguin. Another survivor who somehow slipped through the cracks of a system that was never meant to let them live.

Mosaic’s life may have begun as a chequered one. But here at sanctuary, piece by piece, we are helping him rebuild it. And we trust, in time, what once marked him with suffering will instead become something else entirely. It will be a story not just of what he endured…

But of who he became because of it.