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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.
He was a comical little thing, long-legged and gangly – black forelegs, fluffy white body, a jet-black face and the most soulful brown eyes you’ve ever seen. Even though he was newborn, he had tiny, stubby little horns. He was the so cute. Now, we had to name him. I suggested “Dinner”; the girls weren’t impressed, and I was immediately ostracised from the naming committee. After a short debate a unanimous verdict was returned: he would be Shaun the Sheep.
An empty beer bottle made the perfect feeding receptacle. We mixed up a batch of milk, and Shaun found sucking difficult, but he soon got the hang of it, and after a day or two was drinking eagerly. The girls were absolutely delighted with their new charge.
Shaun took up residence in the playhouse in the garden. We filled it with straw, and he was quite happy there. During the day we let him out to wander around the lawn, where he’d follow the girls around and generally make a nuisance of himself. If the back door was left open you’d soon here the clip-clop of little feet on the wooden floor of the kitchen and would have to hunt him out again before he delivered the inevitable “accident”.
Feeding him was the girls’ responsibility, and they loved running out to the playhouse, bottle in hand, to be greeted by excited bleating and tail wagging. Shaun went from strength to strength, and everything seemed to be going well. He even visited the girls’ school, and the little one’s play school, where he was a massive hit with all the children.
But then, out of the blue, Shaun got sick.
We don’t know what happened to him, but in the space of twenty four hours he deteriorated so much that he couldn’t even stand. He was literally on death’s door. We nursed him and minded him as best we could. It looked like he was on his way out, but a course of antibiotics worked its magic, and he pulled back from the brink. He got better, and for a while it looked like he’d pull through.
But it wasn’t to be. As soon as the course of antibiotics was finished Shaun went into relapsed, he faded fast, and 24 hours later he was dead. We had a little funeral for him in the back garden, and the girls read stories to him. In all he lived for just ten days – ten days during which we’d all grown quite attached to the little white bleating bundle. RIP Shaun, we miss you buddy!
