Angel is (more than usually) annoyed with me, because I finally finished helping her get her old wool off. This involves sneakily grabbing a handful of loose wool off her back and then jumping backwards before she can spin around and punch me for invading her personal space like that.
“I keep telling you, you need to have more respect for my boundaries!”
I told her she looks beautiful without all that scruff hanging on her, but she was not appeased. Fortunately there are plenty of Splendid Games to distract her from her fit of pique.
We cleaned up a lot of the fallen branches into a tidy burn pile, which of course means the sheep are contractually obligated to climb all over it, dismantle the pile, and drag the branches everywhere.
“Alright guys, let’s get to work!”
Angel appears to be supervising the job site.
“We’ll get started on this end!”
I think Mira’s been teaching all the others what a Splendid Game it is to drag sticks around.
“Don’t look at me, this is YOUR stick collection! I keep mine in the other field!”
I wonder if sheep “mirror” behavior like cats do, and that’s why they meticulously try to un-do everything we do out there, or if they’re just contrary and don’t like us moving or changing things without their permission and want to “fix” it. They definitely don’t like change, and Mira at least has always tried to imitate what she sees me doing, so my money is on both.
Shepherd Life 
Double fun!
Yes!
Geeze, you’d think it wold be more comfortable with that wool OFF! But what do we know??? Stick pile, that is so funny. Wonder what they will do with a fire………obviously not up close but from afar. and probably not for a while yet.
Oh they’re absolutely happier with it off, it’s just the process of *getting* it off that they object to. They can’t seem to connect cause and effect, the same way they still haven’t connected tearing all the tarps off their shelter with a sudden lack of shade. 😂
Dear Sarah,
Poor stick pile. Soon there will be a thin stick mat over part of the field.
Hershey, a friend’s lab, learned to love tomatoes from the garden as she watched her people pick cherry tomatoes and eat them on the spot. I learned that she didn’t know what to do with the first one she pulled off a vine — she thought it might be a kind of ball. However, the second exploded inside her mouth and my friend Jackie said Hershey reacted with a “ooooh, this is goood” face. Ever since, keeping the fence intact around the tomatoes, and the tomatoes intact inside the fence has been a bit of a battle, because she is persistent about getting into them.
Hoping summertime is treating you well, despite the stick pile being dissassembled,
Natalie
Mira has decided the sticks in the burn pile are all hers now. 🙂 she will no doubt be grumpy when the weather dries up enough for us to burn it.
We tried to grow tomatoes in our backyard when I was in high school, and to our great confusion even though there were lots of tomatoes on the plant none of them ever ripened more than halfway. Until we figured out that Buddy, the collie we had at the time, was eating all the tomatoes as soon as they were halfway ripe. Animals, always keeping us who love them on our toes!