ABSTRACT
Sheep were the first animals farmed by human beings: evidence for their domestication goes back 11,000 years. In Australia sheep were deployed – against their own interests, considering the harshness of the environments they were forced into, and their treatment by pastoralists – as agents for the expansion of white settlement, the corresponding displacement of indigenous Australians, and the transformation of the endemic ecosystem. As native plants and animals were devastated, the native Australians who depended on them had no choice but to abandon their lands, or to participate in pastoralism, either through sheep-rustling or working for those white settlers willing to have them. Both the 'placer' sheep and the 'stupid' sheep – to the extent that the latter exists, and is not merely a product of human inability to recognise forms of intelligence different from our own – should be regarded as pathologies, and their aetiologies located in human practices.
