There is so much to love about the modern world, is there not? What with our pandemics and our internecine conflicts, our happy insistence on dismantling women’s rights around the world and putting paid to all notion of human history as a tale of essentially linear progress – one hardly knows what to choose out of this panoply of delights!
But first amongst almost equals I think has to be our readiness to seek and snuff out any spark of hope that occasionally and against all the odds sputter into life and give even the darkest pessimists amongst us a feeling that it is worth struggling through another day.
Take, for example, the rescue of Fiona. She was dubbed Britain’s loneliest sheep after she was found on a shingle beach at the bottom of a steep cliff in the Scottish Highlands after being marooned there for two years.
For various reasons, official animal welfare charities couldn’t help but after her plight came to public attention Cammy Wilson, a sheep shearer from Ayrshire and a presenter of the BBC’s Landward programme, got a group of farmers and some heavy equipment together and hauled Fiona (and her huge untended fleece) up the cliff to safety. She has been checked over, sheared, found a new home with her kind and her fleece is to be made into keepsakes that will be sold for charity.
I did a check early on that Fiona wasn’t a menopausal sheep who had launched herself down the cliff to an isolated spot in desperate search of some peace and quiet after a lifetime of attending to other sheep’s physical and emotional needs, but a country friend of mine assured me that this is not how sheep work.
They are flock animals. They need company and, I am told, are not required to cook fishfingers for their lambs every 10 minutes or make them a last-minute fancy dress costume for some spurious school celebration they have only been told about as their offspring gamboled off to bed.
So – we can all agree that the rescue and rehoming of Fiona, the world’s no longer loneliest sheep, is a lovely, uplifting (literally – look, it even yields puns for the simple and/or simply exhausted amongst us!) story and one we can all cling to as a drowning man to driftwood in these desperate times.
Not so fast, my friends.
For when it was discovered where Fiona had been sent to live out the rest of her days, protest – and indeed protests – ensued. Our ovine heroine was due to been sent to a nearby petting zoo (currently closed for the winter, which would give her five months to settle in and get to know her sheepy and human compadres) but an animal rights group that had spent three days visiting Fiona on her beach and say they were in the process of organising a rescue before the farmers swooped in and got the job done. So they gathered at Fiona’s intended destination and started protesting against her “exploitation” and calling for “sanctuary not spectacle.”
And this, I’m afraid Fiona, is where we are. In the estimate two years you have been away, the world has gone mad. It hasn’t been great, sanity-wise, since 2016 to be honest, but now things are truly out of hand. We live in a world, you see, where the idea of a few children looking at a sheep amounts to “exploitation”. Where showing a sheep who has briefly united a nation in hope on television in her newly-shorn state (she was hand-sheared to make sure she was left with a decent winter coat) is “spectacle” and detrimental to the beast’s mental health and wellbeing.
It is a snapshot of just how febrile and nonsensical the world and its discourse has become, how absurdly – and in other contexts dangerously – abused our language has become.
Gone is the notion of restraint, of keeping your powder dry, of admitting nuance and distinguishing perhaps between “not absolutely perfect but pretty damn good and a marked improvement on the previous situation” and “OMG, hell is empty and all the devils are here” states of affairs, and overall of avoiding the devaluation of whichever currency you hold dear.
Words like “spectacle” and even more so “exploitation” mean something important. They do not mean letting a sheep who probably can’t cope with normal sheep life yet be visited on a fun farm and maybe fed a few food pellets instead of grass by entranced children.
Should Fiona ever become away of this fuss I suspect she will soon be wanting to return to her rocky isolation. And wouldn’t we all like to join her.