	Sheep are weird animals. From the window of my little office, where I compose this blog, I can see out across a field and towards the sea. At this particular time of the year the field has sheep in it and their behaviour is at times quite bizarre. It can be pouring with rain and they'll just be standing there, passing the time of day with their brains apparently in shutdown mode.
Another day it'll be fine and sunny and there they'll be, lurking at the edges of the field or skulking along the margins.
Every once in a while, for no apparent reason, they'll all suddenly start running across the field as though they'd a pack of ravening wolves hot on their heels - maybe they have and they're invisble ravening wolves? Suddenly they'll all stop dead in their tracks again and start nibbling at a blade of grass as though nothing had just happened.
	Many years ago now I was walking the Ridgeway in Buckinghamshire when I was called across by a farmer and asked if I'd give him a hand loading a dead sheep into his Landrover. Ever one for a new experience I of course agreed and we set off across the field in said example of Solihull's finest export to where, true to his word, was a very dead sheep. It hadn't been dead long but was already in the 'upside down legs stiff and in the air' pose that seems to come so naturally to woolly ruminants. He explained that there was a problem with the soil - it was deficient in magnesium - the sheep ate the grass but it didn't contain enough magnesium and so the sheep didn't get as much as they needed. Apparently they could go from 'standing up and looking quite normal' to 'upside down legs stiff in the air' in just a few minutes. He'd laid extra magnesium but they didn't seem to be eating it.
Another farmer I once knew in Yorkshire reckoned that sheep could sometimes just drop down dead for no apparent reason or maybe just out of spite. Weird animals.

05-12-06 Playpark AGM Postponed

Sheep are weird animals.