The Sheep We Never Got to Know

We need to tell you about Gabby. Though the truth is, we never really got to know her because less than 48 hours after arriving at sanctuary, she was gone.

But beyond the facts of those fleeting hours was someone whose life mattered long before it intersected with ours.

Gabby was a four-year-old fine-wool Merino who had birthed a lamb only months earlier. Her overgrown fleece bore the unmistakable signature of a breed selectively shaped over generations to grow extraordinary quantities of fibres prized for their fineness. But wool is not made from nothing. Its growth draws upon the body’s resources and can bear witness to times of illness and nutritional stress. Humans have bred Gabby’s kind to wear upon their bodies something enormously valuable to us.

Yet they are the ones who pay its hidden price.

Gabby came to us unable to stand, reportedly because of a foot condition. Yet the mild dermatitis we found could not explain the profoundly unwell sheep before us. And nothing in the painfully short time we had with her could. There is an old saying that “no one has a death wish like a sick Merino”.

We don’t believe that.

We never did.  And we never will.

We have witnessed too many Merinos fight with everything they have to remain in this world. What can look like giving up is often something far sadder: someone who has already spent every last reserve trying not to.

And Gabby had.

She was breathtakingly beautiful and desperately frightened of us. And oh, how we wished for the time to learn who lived behind that fear, and to show her that human hands could bring kindness.

But time can be a cruel master. And the time we needed to know Gabby was the very thing Gabby no longer had.

And so the intimacy of our journey with Gabby became not learning what she loved, where she liked to be scratched or who she might choose as a friend, but recognising when our hope could no longer ask more of her.

Perhaps this is what loving animals with the whole of ourselves demands. We love them knowing we will one day lose them. Sometimes after decades. Sometimes before we have even had the privilege of knowing them.

Gabby deserved more than the otherness our world had assigned her. She was more than wool and more than a body bred to bear burdens of our making.

She deserved to be someone.

And she was.

So when goodbye became the kindest word we had left to offer, we gave it with all the tenderness we wished we’d had years to show her.

We never got the chance to know you, Gabby.

But we knew enough to know you mattered.

Godspeed, beautiful one. Godspeed.