The Little Ginger Blog

, by Caitlin

I'm not the most animal loving person. I'll openly admit that. I spent my early childhood growing up in a family with no pets and that was fine. Dogs used to scared me a little and cats and I had this perfect agreement -you ignore me and I'll avoid annoying you...

But when we moved that changed. We way had more land, a green luscious paddock and so we were gifted with two sheep and a retired pony.

I'll openly admit that while I loved my pony I never gave it as much attention as I should have. But I know that for the time she was with us she was happy.

When I was 11 she died. It was sad, but dad buried her under the tree and everyone agreed she had been much better off with us than her previous home.

The two sheep were another story. They had been hand reared and so spent a lot of time running up and butting us from behind.

We fed them fairy bread at parties and petted them when they came to greet us. And very slowly, without us realising, they grew a special place in my heart.

So my pets weren't normal but I spoke to them and I LOVED them and sadly we really never got to say goodbye...

and although we've had chickens and a pony these two where our first real pets. They were with us from the beginning and as a child I thought they would last forever.
Before we had a lot of our fences we used to have a sign in the gate that mum and I made that said "please shut the gate" and on it we had drawn two little fluffy black faced sheep. Our sheep drawings always had black faces because of them. There just something much nicer about suffolk sheep.

When we're little we're taught that cows moo and sheep baa. But our sheep had such low voices that they sounded like cows! Image our surprise the first time we heard a deep maaaa coming from outside.
One year they got inside the house because we were too slow shutting the door. Two fat sheep that had climbed up the stairs into our home and wandered into the lounge room. It was just before Christmas and much to my little brother's dismay they begun eating our plastic Christmas tree.

And the size change when they were sheared. It was like one of those before and after weight loss adverts. Suddenly they were no longer huge but small little sheep again.