Shaun the sheep — ten days of life — RIP
Calvin posted this on May 1st 2008 under Animals, Children, Evening Echo Column, Parenting, Pets
Published in the Evening Echo, 30/04/2008
When we first saw him standing in the boot of the VW Golf he was so tiny, helpless and utterly gorgeous that we fell in love with him instantly. You couldn’t help but want to take him home and mind him. So we did.
But wait… you need a bit of background. We’d arranged to meet friends in Kenmare. On the trip over the Cork Kerry mountains they came across a forlorn, abandoned little creature, bleating desperately on the windswept roadside. They looked for the newborn lamb’s mother, but she was nowhere to be seen, there was no farm in the immediate vicinity, and no way of identifying who owned him. Lost and abandoned he would surely die… they could either leave him to the crows and other scavengers, or step in and rescue him.
Perhaps the right choice would have been to leave him to his fate… but how many of us, faced with such a dilemma, could leave a helpless baby to die? I suspect not many. And so they brought him into Kenmare to meet us.
Now, this must be a fairly regular springtime occurrence in Kenmare… because they went into the local pharmacy (not the co-op or farm-supply shop… a regular pharmacy), and lo and behold, they stocked rubber lamb-teats and ewes milk replacement formula.
