sheep

Sheep are stupid! But I like them. Especially roasted and swimming in mint sauce. Fortunately the fields around us are slowly filling up again after the disaster and debacle of the Government’s stunning response to the Foot and Mouth outbreak of 2001. Almost every lamb and sheep in Cheshire was slaughtered and yet there was not a single confirmed case of the disease in the whole county. What a waste!

In fact it was quite a spectacle the day the sheep disappeared. It was like martial law had been imposed on Cheshire. I arrived home from work to find the lane near home blocked off by the army. I had to wait an hour or so. They were gathering all of the sheep together and putting them onto trains to take them to slaughter. It was like a scene from the holocaust. They didn’t want anyone watching.

After I finally got home we had another army Land Rover come hurtling onto the drive and four squaddies rushed out: “You got any sheep or other livestock?”, they barked. We hadn’t. At first they didn’t believe us. You see the property was still called “School Farm” on the local A to Z. But we did manage to convince them in the end – although they were very suspicious of the old hen coup in our side garden, which was now just used as a shed and dumping ground.

In truth though a number of local farmers did foil the army search. Many kept a breeding pair in their homes throughout this period. Foot and Mouth was nothing new and they realised the Government was overreacting. And, they couldn’t bear to lose their entire flocks.

The silence of the sheep. It was eerily quiet around the hamlet with the sheep gone, and the cows in sheds. The moles moved in. And the foxes and badgers. The buzzards. The barn owls. These seemed to increase significantly as the fields emptied of livestock. The moles seem to have stayed, much to the chagrin of those of our neighbours who are proud of their lawns.

T and R, our most lawn proud neighbours, suffer really badly with moles. It is a real shame because they love their garden and nature in general. In the summer they live outdoors. They have a split-level pool cum fish pond where they encourage newts and frogs and discourage the herons it attracts. But, R is a big softy. He doesn’t like the thought of killing anything. So getting rid of the moles is a bit difficult. There are many myths about moles, you know. Rat poison doesn’t work – they can smell it and they avoid it. They just dig another hole. Moth balls don’t work for much the same reason. You can’t smoke or flood them out because their burrows are far too extensive – they just move out of the way, seek higher ground. There are really only two effective ways to kill them. You can go out at night, wait until you see a mound (mole hill) forming, wait till the little bugger pops his head up, and, whack him with a shovel. Or, you can use razor blades. Moles are haemophiliacs. Their blood doesn’t clot. If you push a razor blade into the run of a mole and they run over it, and cut themselves, they bleed to death…..

Moles can be trapped though, and relocated. But, you have to be very careful not to leave your scent on the trap. T approached me one day when R was still at work and asked me to lay a trap. I did. R subsequently sabotaged it by “checking” on it. He touched the trap. He knew what he was doing. He’s a really nice guy.

The Foot and Mouth outbreak finished off a number of the farmers around here. They are tenant farmers in the main. They do not own their own land or houses. So, when times are tough they have nothing to borrow against. I once helped a farmer-neighbour when his tractor caught fire at the height of Foot and Mouth. He cried. He wasn’t insured. He couldn’t afford the premium. He was losing a fortune at the time and thought that the cost of fixing the tractor would push them into bankruptcy. Several of the farms went under. Most are over-priced, poorly designed, badly decorated conversions now. Tis a shame.

But, we still have the moles. And the sheep are back. Sheep are stupid. Have you noticed that they stand in lines. They all look in the same direction. They stare. C says it might be a zen thing. I doubt it. It can be quite spooky when they all line up and stare at you. For no good reason. Spooky. And, it is rude to stare.

On one occasion C and I were walking across the fields to our local pub. At one point we found a sheep with its head stuck in a wire fence. Well stuck. It would seem that it had pushed its head through in an attempt to get at a bucket on the other side which had some kind of food stuff in it. The wire was beginning to cut into its neck. I tried to get it out. I pulled and I pulled. I tugged and I tugged. It budged not a bit. In the end we decided to fetch the farmer.

The farmer didn’t seem too happy when we caught up with him. He was just leaving in his Land Rover. Probably off to the pub, or out for Sunday lunch somewhere. We watched him trudge across the field. He found the sheep. He climbed over the fence and he moved the bucket further away. The sheep, realising that there was no way it could get at the food, simply reversed. It backed out, shook its head and rejoined the flock. The farmer shook his head and probably muttered something like “bloody townies”. Sheep are stupid? I was only trying to help…

He has already created a sheep liver which has a large proportion of human cells and eventually hopes to precisely match a sheep to a transplant patient, using their own stem cells to create their own flock of sheep.

The process would involve extracting stem cells from the donor's bone marrow and injecting them into the peritoneum of a sheep's foetus. When the lamb is born, two months later, it would have a liver, heart, lungs and brain that are partly human and available for transplant.

"We would take a couple of ounces of bone marrow cells from the patient,' said Prof Zanjani, whose work is highlighted in a Channel 4 programme tomorrow.

"We would isolate the stem cells from them, inject them into the peritoneum of these animals and then these cells would get distributed throughout the metabolic system into the circulatory system of all the organs in the body. The two ounces of stem cell or bone marrow cell we get would provide enough stem cells to do about ten foetuses. So you don't just have one organ for transplant purposes, you have many available in case the first one fails."

At present 7,168 patients are waiting for an organ transplant in Britain alone, and two thirds of them are expected to die before an organ becomes available.

Scientists at King's College, London, and the North East Stem Cell Institute in Newcastle have now applied to the HFEA, the Government's fertility watchdog, for permission to start work on the chimeras.

But the development is likely to revive criticisms about scientists playing God, with the possibility of silent viruses, which are harmless in animals, being introduced into the human race.

Dr Patrick Dixon, an international lecturer on biological trends, warned: "Many silent viruses could create a biological nightmare in humans. Mutant animal viruses are a real threat, as we have seen with HIV."

Animal rights activists fear that if the cells get mixed together, they could end up with cellular fusion, creating a hybrid which would have the features and characteristics of both man and sheep. But Prof Zanjani said: "Transplanting the cells into foetal sheep at this early stage does not result in fusion at all