There is a young, male sheep in Namibia – and in Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild (Channel 5) – who I feel very sorry for. For starters, he’s being castrated, and that’s a sad thing for any young male. And the reason he’s being castrated isn’t great: it’s to make him taste nicer. So he’s also got being slaughtered and eaten to look forward to.
Back to his castration, though, and the manner in which this is carried out, and the person who does it. (Can you guess who it is yet?) I’ve been on a sheep farm where they castrate sheep just by popping a little elastic band over their sheepy balls, which drop off in time. The animals feel nothing, don’t notice their emasculation and never wonder why they don’t become rams. (Anyway, they get slaughtered and eaten before then.) It seems like the least horrid way to go about it.
It’s different from Northumberland: in Namibia, the farmer slices the sheep’s scrotum with a knife, then goes in headfirst, gets hold of a testicle between his teeth and pulls it out. Then the other. And guess who’s playing the sheep farmer today? Imagine it: having your gonads bitten and sucked out by Ben frigging Fogle. Is that not the ultimate ignominy, for a male of any species?
The other standout moment in this programme, in which Fogle hangs out with Gideon David and his family in the Namibian desert, is when his host shoots a kind of antelope known as a gemsbok. The animal drops to the ground, then farmers go in to cut its throat to ensure it’s dead and to drain the blood. The gemsbok grunts and kicks its legs.
“Is that just reflexes?” ask Ben. “Yeah, just reflexes,” says Gideon. The gemsbok groans loudly. “That’s just reflexes again,” says Ben, though he looks a bit worried. This poor creature carries on kicking and groaning as they talk. I think if it got back up on its feet again and hobbled over to its herd to say its goodbyes, they’d still say: “Just reflexes.” Anyway, it’s all making me feel a bit vegetarian.
