The story of Baby who lives at The Same-Star Sheep Sanctuary (https://www.facebook.com/samestarsheep) Baby was the catalyst for starting a sheep sanctuary.

Baby has a touching back story to how he came to live at the Sanctuary, which I quote from their FB page:

My Beautiful Baby-

Time for a bit of honesty; Baby, like all of my sheep, means so much to me. But whenever I think of his backstory I feel a heaviness which is hard to describe.

Anyone who has met me or even just knows me on social media will know that I’m a big advocate for animals, I don’t believe they should be murdered for human pleasure. However I didn’t always think like that, like most people I used to hold onto a delusion that farmed animals were treated well. I only bought “high welfare meat”. I told myself that they didn’t know they were about to die, they didn’t feel a thing, it didn’t matter as long as they’d had a good life….amongst other bullshit justifications I would tell myself.

On top of this, I did a lot of work on a sheep farm, I loved the sheep, so I decided to take on orphan lambs and fatten and sell them to other farms. It took me a long time to relate what I was doing to being part of the industry which is constantly abusing animals.

The last group of lambs I sold on were George, Snowball, Billy, Flower, Brownie, Gypsy, and Baby. I sold them to the farm I worked on at the time, and it was round this time where my mindset changed a lot, I was already vegetarian but again didn’t align what I was doing with my internal morals…I think because I still was part of the lambs lives even after I sold them, I couldn’t block out any part of the process.

Flower, Brownie, and Gypsy died of illness, which is an awful but natural part of working with animals.

But Billy, George, and Snowball….the day I walked them off the trailer into the holding pens at the slaughterhouse is a memory which still keeps me up at night. I’ve never felt right since. These babies who I’d nursed and raised and who followed me so willingly were then electrocuted, strung up, throats slit and left to bleed out. Looking back it doesn’t feel like me, but it was.

Baby wasn’t taken that day, he was always sickly and far too small to be used for food. I always said that if I had a big field I’d of taken them all and they could of lived their lives in peace.

About two weeks after I walked the others to their death I was offered the long term lease of more grazing. The first thing I did was ask if I could buy Baby back. Luckily for both of us I was able to. I’d already decided to start the sanctuary by this point so Baby came back to base straight away.

Since then I’ve left animal farming totally behind me, I don’t want to be part of that world in the way I was before. I’ve left my job on the farm and I’ve began working as a veterinary assistant at a farm sanctuary. I finally feel like me.

I can’t erase the things I’ve seen and done, and I can never erase the part I played in sheeps’ suffering, but I can move forward with the promise of protecting them from here on out. I can dedicate my life to helping them, to keeping them safe, and saving who I can.

Saving Baby, and the others who now call my land home, can’t erase the guilt, or the blood on my hands, but I hope that it goes some way to gaining some redemption in the eyes of all those sheep I’ve said goodbye to, who I’ve held back on, who I’ve sold on to people who were neither kind or good, who I’ve walked down the trailer into the gates of their own personal hell. In the end that’s all I want.

More pictures of Baby:

Other Sheep with Tales

Midge