Gus is one of the great loves of my life. Every day I sit in the paddock waiting for him to sneak up behind me and breathe hotly on my neck. I always laugh in response, but if I don’t turn around, he softly rakes my back with his hoof until I do. Gus loves being petted, and even though his favourite spot is under the chin, he will manoeuvre his body around me until I’ve attended to every scratchable part of him. He then lies down beside me to chew his cud and burp in my face and, if he’ll let me that day, I gently check his hooves. Often I bring a book with me, and quietly read with one hand resting on him. If I remove my hand, or he wants more attention, again he taps me with his hoof. Sometimes he gets up and walks away, but it’s usually me who has something else to do. Some of the most perfect moments of my life have been spent sitting quietly beside Gus, both of our faces lifted to the sky, eyes closed, warmed and united in gratitude under the low afternoon sun.

Gus is a six-year-old, castrated Arapawa ram. One of Aotearoa New Zealand’s endemic feral breeds, they evolved from the Gulf Coast Native sheep that were brought here by American whalers in the early 1800s to use as a source of food on return voyages. He is the offspring of Grace, my best friend in the flock, one of four ewes I brought home from a local farm nine years ago. It comes as a surprise to many, given the relationship that I have with Gus, that I could one day eat him and sleep on his skin.

A different relationship

I have a full-time job as a design anthropologist, but I became a shepherd, too, in response to research I’d been doing on sheep farming. There is a highly politicised game farmers, environmentalists, animal activists and consumers have been playing over the future of sheep farming in places like the UK, Australia and New Zealand, and I wanted to have a personal stake in it rather than provide ‘expert opinion’ from the outside.

Leading the current anti-sheep movement in the UK is writer and critic George Monbiot, who calls sheep a ‘white plague’ and coined the term ‘sheepwrecked’ to describe what hill farming has done to Britain’s ‘natural’ environment. Between ‘rewilding’ efforts and campaigning against the environmental impact of livestock emissions, animal activists seek everything from accurate product labelling, improved shearing welfare and a ban on live export, to a complete end to the use of sheep for meat, milk or wool because of what is perceived as the inevitable abuse caused by industrialised farming systems. At the other end of the spectrum is the Campaign for Wool, an international effort led by the British Wool industry group under the patronage of King Charles III. With a mandate to educate consumers on the benefits of wool, it presents sheep farming as a solution for humanity’s need to mass-produce renewable materials with a fraction of the environmental impact of synthetic fibres, while also preserving traditional pastoral farming systems and ways of life.

Of course, both of these scenarios are just part of the story. I wanted to see if we could have different relationships with farmed animals. It’s become hard to imagine, let alone comprehend, what it’s like to be more than mere users or consumers of sheepskin and wool, to know what it’s like to produce these materials ourselves – to live and die alongside other animals.

This kind of relationship is not new. It used to be common to sleep on, and under, the skin and fibre of the sheep and goats we used our own hands to bring into the world; animals we kept alive for milk and wool and companionship, and killed to feed our families.

But most of us have lost touch with the Earth’s cycles of life and death.

At present, the global number of farmed sheep exceeds one and a half billion animals. Around 350 million tonnes of edible lamb and mutton are still produced each year to keep humans and our pets fed. Sheepskins are exclusively a co-product of the meat industry, extending the value of each animal killed, minimising waste and providing a renewable and biodegradable material for everyday use. Both lamb- and mature sheepskins currently find their way into our beds as medical textiles to support and protect our most vulnerable bodies, and as luxury underlays and throws for anyone who can afford them.

This same global flock produces over a million kilograms of wool each year – a single high-end mattress will contain roughly 10 kg of merino wool. Despite a decades-long decline in wool production due to the rise of synthetic fibres, when it comes to textiles that directly touch our skin, research indicates that we prefer the feel of pure wool and cotton to human-made fibres; and merino is our preferred wool because of its fineness and softness. Maybe it comes down to physical comfort and functionality. Perhaps we want a little more ‘nature’ in our increasingly ‘unnatural’ lives. Possibly we recognise that wool is animal, and we are too.

Skinning sheep

So what is it like to produce a sheepskin yourself?

I can tell you that skinning sheep is hot and slippery work. I’ve cut myself and seen the same layers of skin, fat, muscle and bone in my own body. I’ve got scars to remind me where I was wounded in the process. But once you’re under the sheep’s skin you can use your fist to push and roll your knuckles between it and muscle, breaking the connective tissue as you go. Fleshing the pelt without damaging it is equally careful, slow and tiring work. By the end of these tasks, you have a clean hide and a deep ache in your hands, arms and shoulders. The fat and lanolin stick to your skin, leaving it unusually soft and smelling distinctly of sheep for hours and days to come. The rest of the tanning process is an exercise in patience as you wash and dry and rub animal fat into the hide. Sheep are elegantly designed, self-sustaining creatures. Each sheep has enough brain material to tan its own hide. Hunters have known this for hundreds of thousands of years, and shepherds for more than ten thousand. Brain tissue is full of lecithin, a fatty substance and natural tannin; rubbing this into the hide will keep it soft and supple. Afterwards you smoke the pelt with plant materials over several days. This smoke acts as an insecticide. A well-prepared and cared-for sheepskin will last decades.

There is very little waste, and the environmental impact is negligible. During the tanning process, you have a lot of time to think about how you lived with the animal and wonder what it will be like to recognise that beloved sheep in your bed, and sink into its wool again.

By comparison, in the mass production of meat, machines peel the animal skins off like gloves, and pack them in salt. Pelts then get rehydrated in large tanks of hot water, so that they can be stretched and fleshed by other machines. Chromium salts are used to speed up tanning, cutting the processing time by days. This chemical intervention supports mass production in line with the meat industry but requires large amounts of clean water that gets turned into highly contaminated wastewater, making this kind of leather a significant and persistent threat to the environment. The live animals are rarely known to the factory workers, and very little time is spent smelling or touching the animals themselves. Most of the sheepskins find their way onto other people’s beds, nowhere near the land on which the animals, the farmers or the factory workers slept and dreamed.

The story of wool

Wool, either attached or unattached to the skin it grew on, is extraordinary in its material properties. It is fire resistant, durable, flexible and soft. It is odour- and stain-resistant and easy to care for. As an active fibre, wool has antibacterial and antimicrobial properties and is hypoallergenic. Wool is highly breathable, allowing twice as much moisture vapour to be absorbed and released as cotton does, helping it better regulate local humidity and temperature. And while farmers, researchers and activists debate the environmental and animal welfare impacts of sheep farming – or whether it can be ethically and sustainably mass-produced within current systems – wool has become the world’s most reused and recycled fibre.

Wool production is fundamentally different from producing sheepskins, because the sheep isn’t killed. But it tells similar stories of the connection and interdependence between species. A shepherd will know the land, and their flock, and understand by sight or touch if the structural integrity of the fibre was degraded by adverse environmental conditions or nutritional deficiencies. Some shepherds will even know the life stories of each animal and notice how the bodies of all living creatures change with age and eventually fall apart. Some shepherds sleep outside, kept warm by a living flock or the blanket they wove from last season’s wool. Other shepherds wrap their own babies in each season’s lambswool and watch human and sheep grow together.

Spanning a wide range of geographies and cultures, as well as tens if not hundreds of millennia, the role that wool has played in humanity’s waking and sleeping lives is difficult to overstate. At the end of the Middle Ages, Britain was a land of sheep farmers and textile producers. By the 1800s, Australia and New Zealand were nations built on the sheep’s back, the Indigenous peoples violently dispossessed of their land and displaced from their homes to make way for sheep that could feed and clothe the British Empire. Organic materials do not preserve well in the archaeological record, denying our impulse to monumentalise human accomplishments and mocking our hubris. But there is little reason to doubt that shed wool was gathered from wild sheep, or cut from hunted carcasses, and formed into mattresses or woven into blankets for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years before sheep were domesticated.

For thousands of years before the first domesticated sheep were introduced to the Americas, the Coast Salish people of the Pacific Northwest bred and kept small, woolly dogs that were shorn like sheep and their hair added to wild sheep wool to make blankets. For many Indigenous people, wool blankets have always been more than utilitarian or beautiful bedding. Chief Janice George of the Squamish Nation wrote:

You should think about blankets as merged objects. They are alive because they exist in the spirit world. They are the animal. They are part of the hunter; they are part of the weaver; they are part of the wearer.

Counting sheep

I choose to raise sheep for companionship and meat. Arapawa do not produce quality wool for spinning and weaving, and some winters are wet enough that it starts to felt right on their bodies. But the flock only needs shearing once a year after the wool grows too long for comfort, and I use it as mulch for our fruit and nut trees. The lambs live their entire lives on this land. They are never separated from their mothers. They never know the stress of transport or industrial slaughter. Sheep largely take care of themselves here – and many commercial flocks in New Zealand effectively live as wild animals for most of their lives. Most farmwork involves taking care of the land, water, fences and mechanical equipment – and the interactions farmers have with their sheep are mostly at a distance. On my small non-commercial farm, I name each animal and talk with them every day. At night, I give each sheep a bucket with a bit of extra feed and minerals, and while they eat, I check them for obvious injury and any uncharacteristic behaviour that might indicate illness or some other issue. Gus gets fed twice as much as the ewes because he eats more, and faster, than they do, and otherwise he will steal everyone else’s food. Sometimes he gets so excited when he eats that he tries to bleat with his mouth full and still in the bucket, making a ridiculous sound that never fails to make me giggle.

The sheep and I live together, and some of us will grow old and die together. We are deeply embedded in each other’s lives in ways most of us would associate only with family. Ultimately, I may end their lives – one day even Gus’s life. Death on the farm is always sad, but I’m comforted by the full circle of life. There is no fear, and nothing is wasted. The parts of their bodies I don’t eat, I turn into rich soil to fertilise next year’s vegetables. We form our own ecosystem within bigger ecosystems on a planetary scale. I am the first and last human the sheep see. The responsibility and accountability that come with this relationship stagger me some days.

Some of you would never kill a sheep with your own hands or put a sheepskin on your bed, but would happily sleep on top of, or underneath, wool, and provide the same opportunity to a pet cat or dog fattened on lamb. Others would avoid wool completely, in favour of organic fibres that clearly align you with the plant side of the ‘natural’ animal–plant divide. And some would choose synthetics for no other reason than that they are what you can afford. In a society where consumer choices in bedding are indicative not just of one’s taste but also of one’s moral fibre, it may be tempting to use only materials that would otherwise be wasted, or to ditch animal products entirely. But what stories would that tell of our relationships with other creatures? How would we understand what it means to live and die alongside our fellow animals?

The familiar nighttime ritual of counting sheep to fall asleep comes from the yan-tan-tethera counting system of northern English shepherds and knitters, though the lives of the sheep we count now are largely unknown to us. The wool in our blankets, pillows and mattresses now comes from distant flocks and people. Yet to sleep with the remains of animals long dead is to remember and imagine different ways of living. If we conjure the sheep, shepherds and weavers that produce our bedding as we drift off to sleep, we hold a place for them in our future.

Image credit: Anne Galloway, Gus, 2023