Sheep Aren't Stupid

“I've learnt in life—you just have to be whatever you feel you are, and then you will do well. If you remove the hang ups that hold you back you will do things to the best of your ability.”

Kate Stone

Sheep Aren’t Stupid

The sun was filtered through gray, thin clouds when I got up and out this morning.  The temperature was very similar.  It was a morning in winter, it wasn’t a real bright day, nor was it a real cold day.  But no matter, my animals were doing what they do every day.  They were huddled together, near their feeding station, waiting for me to provide them with food.

I threw hay into the manger and then began to fill their water tank.  As the water gushed into the metal container I began to think of lessons I’ve learned from being a rancher and more specifically thought about what Kate Stone taught me about her experience as a sheepherder on a large station in Australia.

Kate reminisced, “I ended up on a farm with about twenty-two thousand sheep.  It was about one hundred degrees there all the time! The sheep were the most important thing.  We’d go out to gather them up, to bring them back to the homestead.  We’d do this using horses, using motorbikes and building fences and the sheep would make it all the way back to the shearing shed for the different seasons.  What I learned was, I thought at the time, like everybody else that sheep were pretty stupid because they wouldn’t do what we wanted them to do, what I realize now, looking back, is the sheep weren’t stupid at all.  We put them in an environment where they didn’t want to be!  And, they didn’t’ do what we wanted them to do!  So the challenge was trying to get them to do what we wanted them to do by listening to the weather, the lay of the land, and creating things that would let the sheep flow and go where we wanted them to go.”

The water continued to flow from the hose held in my hand.  My animals were munching on their breakfast.  My dog was doing what she always does; run up and down the fence line barking at the cows and horse on the other side of the fence.

Her barking didn’t change the behavior of the cows.  They were doing exactly what they wanted to do.  They were eating! They knew the dog couldn’t get through the fence to nip at their heals!

Kate’s message continued to nip at my mind, “Another bunch of years later I ended up at Cambridge University doing a Ph.D. in physics. And, my Ph.D. was to move electrons around one at a time.  I realize it was pretty much the same as moving sheep around.  It really is!  You do it by changing an environment!”

My largest steer was standing right in front of me.  “I couldn’t push him out of the way if I tried.” I said to myself.  He weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of two thousand pounds right now.  But, I’ve changed his environment by giving him food so he’s moved himself.  I could never force him to move anywhere he didn’t want to go!

Kate went on in my mind, “That’s been a big lesson to me.  You can’t act on any object.  You change its environment and the object will flow.”

I was standing in the middle of one of the most important learning moments in my life.  Yet, I wouldn’t have even taken note of it had Kate not said to me, “A lot of my learning came from being on the farm.  Because when I was working on the farm we had to use what was around us.  We’d have to use the environment.  There was no such thing, as something can’t be done.  Because you’re in an environment where if you can’t do what you need to do, you can die and I’d seen that sort of thing happen.”

I thought back to last winter when my largest steer, a real mean son-of-a-gun, had me and my daughter Kilee leaping up and over the fence on several occasions to save our own lives!  We were trying to make him go in a corral he didn’t want to go in.  It took me several days before I was smart enough to put hay where I wanted him to go so he would take himself there!

Kate went on in my mind, “It’s like going back to the farm.”

I stood, hose in hand, thinking,  “It’s about how to let myself become the person I want to become rather than trying to force myself into something I really don’t want to be.  I need to make sure I put myself in an environment, and with people, that will allow me to flow into the person I really want to be naturally!

Kate said it best, “I've learnt in life—you just have to be whatever you feel you are, and then you will do well. If you remove the hang ups that hold you back you will do things to the best of your ability.”