My husband and I had the good fortune to spend three months in New Zealand. With a population of only 4 million people and 20 million sheep it’s not an exaggeration to say that sheep are everywhere!
One time during our stay, we were out hiking amongst the sheep but they are extremely skittish and if we came anywhere within about a hundred feet they would quickly scurry away.
This was disappointing to us as we longed to be close to the gentle looking creatures. At one point, we decided to sit down on the grass and do our very best impression of St. Francis. We exuded all the love that we could muster up in hopes they would come over and cozy up to us—just one big loving family. In our imagination birds were landing on our hands and butterflies were circling our heads.
As we were hunkered down in prayer waiting and hoping for them to meander over, an unusual thing started happening. One by one, the sheep started lining up on a nearby ridge. Instead of the love we hoped to share, they appeared to be staring us down. If this were a Western movie there would be loud ominous music playing. Every single one of them had their eyes trained on us and it looked like they meant business.
Suddenly our extreme ignorance of animal behavior became glaringly obvious. We simply had no idea whether we were in any kind of real danger. Were they going to stampede and trample us alive? Do sheep even bite? We didn’t know whether we should be alarmed but we did know what major wimps we felt like. Somehow this tinkled our funny bones and we were convulsing with laughter. The more serious it appeared, the harder we laughed. Was this to be our unlikely end? Should we get up and run?
Just then we heard the sweet sound of a baby lamb bahhhing in the distance as it came running by us to rejoin the flock. It turns out that, in fact, the sheep were displaying territorial behavior. They were showing up to protect their young and were prepared to fight! Mercifully despite being some of the world’s dumbest tourists we survived our stand-off unscathed.
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