The Spanish conquistadors brought the first sheep to North America in the 16th century, when they arrived in present-day New Mexico. Later in the early 17th century, English, Dutch, and Swedish settlers brought sheep to the East Coast, and from there spread to other areas in North America. Initially, sheep met the settlers’ daily and immediate needs for wool to weave into fabric for cold-weather wear, as well as for meat. Sheep were eaten seasonally in the spring and summer on the farms where they were raised. Beyond that there was little or no market for mutton in the United States.

In the early 19th century, sheep farming developed into a larger industry because of an increased demand for wool in both national and international markets. By 1830 the growing wool manufacturing industry became increasingly important for the American economy, which demanded more domestic wool. This consequently resulted in increased meat output, as sheep were slaughtered at the end of their wool-productive life. At that time, the meat industry was locally concentrated where farmers sold these animals seasonally to nearby local butcher shops that supplied the local demand. For many more years, however, meat became a secondary product.

From the 1860s on, as the nation industrialized, urbanized, and grew wealthier amidst a wave of European immigration, demand for mutton rose. Midwestern meatpackers turned this meat into a buffer against periods of meat scarcity. When other meats ran short, meatpackers sent buyers to the western states—including California, Texas, and New Mexico—to secure castrated male sheep for slaughter.

Sheep meat markets developed in major cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. Sheep meat was more expensive than other meats and more appealing to the upper classes, so for much of the 19th century mutton or lamb was a rich person’s meal.

In the 1880s and 1890s, young lamb meat gained some popularity as a festive food with upper classes. A young lamb industry, known as a “hothouse,” developed in the East Coast and Midwest. These lambs reached the market by Christmas, and most of them were slaughtered by early spring. It was a prosperous business that remained seasonal.

Greater production reduced some costs and lowered prices, making sheep meat more affordable for low-income households. But beef and pork production also ramped up, and those meats became cheaper, too. Beef sold the best, and large meatpackers who had come to dominate the industry after the development of refrigerated railcars focused on that business.

Americans came to see mutton as an alternative meat, an inferior substitute in times of shortages and disruptions in the beef cattle and pork industries—you ate sheep only when there was nothing else. In popular culture and media, sheep meat was described as unpalatable animal waste. In 1897, a Ranche and Range article stated, “many people settled down to the belief that mutton was poor food.”

Sheep also came to be seen as a meat for immigrants, particularly those from southern and eastern Europe, who were America’s most reliable lamb eaters. American Indian tribes, particularly in Navajo country, also embraced lamb. These social and ethnic associations with sheep meat cemented its outsider status. Meanwhile, the meatpacking industry promoted beef as quintessentially American.

Not all bias against sheep meat was grounded in social prejudice. Some American consumers lost confidence in sheep meat after reports of meatpackers marketing lower-grade mutton and old ewes. Early in the 20th century it also became known that some retail butcher shops sold goat meat as lamb and mutton. Several sheep disease outbreaks made national news during the 1890s and early 1900s, deepening fears about the safety of eating sheep meat.

Americans soon lost not just their taste for sheep meat, but their talent for producing and preparing it. Local butchers did not dress (or gut) the sheep carcasses properly, or use proper mutton-cutting techniques. They did not always remove the red membrane that lines the inner surface of the lamb before cooking it. The waxy, lanolin flavor of this skin—the so-called “caul” or “fell”—may well have been why sheep acquired a reputation for being gamy and having a disagreeable taste.

Prejudice against sheep meat grew so great that it became too hard to change most Americans’ minds. World War I didn’t help. A 1917 “eat-no-lamb” campaign discouraged eating sheep that were needed to make wool. Then, with meat running low, Americans temporarily turned to eating sheep, and they remembered why they hadn’t liked it. Older, mature sheep being slaughtered during the war had a strong flavor and a tough texture.

After the Great War, mutton consumption remained low despite big price drops. Sheep raising became unprofitable for many operators in the West due to both excess supply and very weak demand. By then, the average per capita consumption of sheep meat in the United States was only five pounds per year, versus 67 pounds of beef or 71 pounds of pork.

Woolgrowers, meatpackers, and wholesalers didn’t give up. They started developing campaigns to encourage lamb and mutton consumption. In 1919, the National Woolgrowers Association launched a nationwide campaign to boost sheep meat consumption in the United States (which still persists in some ways) with the slogan “EAT MORE LAMB.” The U.S. Food and Drug Administration attempted to help encourage the consumption of lamb and mutton as a means of conserving the available supply of pork and beef.

But 100 years later, none of these efforts have stuck. Since then, throughout the 20th century and into the present, production of sheep meat showed a significant decrease. Such decrease in production has been accompanied by higher prices of this meat responsible for the greater production costs. Overall profitability has been decreasing gradually due to higher production costs. Both high prices and short supply have diminished its consumption and prevented its increase. But also, there is a social sense of rejection toward sheep meat.

Today, sheep consumption tends to be seasonal—with lamb (and occasionally mutton) on American tables during Easter, Christmas, and other significant religious holidays. As the holiday season begins, sheep may be part of your celebrations—perhaps with a roast leg of lamb on your table but just as likely with a pair of wool socks in your pile of gifts.

The post Why Ewe Eat Lamb on Holidays (but Not the Rest of the Year) appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As I take a slight turn to the right, a woman and her German Shepherd appear, walking towards us from the opposite direction. She hesitates. The path is narrow, and for both of us to keep the required distance, someone will have to leave it. We both step aside, drifting apart from each other, but the dogs have a different plan. Skeletor wags his tail; the other dog does, too. They come close and sniffle, happy to see each other. The woman peers at me over her mask. How does she feel meeting another person? Is she even slightly glad to see me? Am I?

This situation has repeated itself a lot in the past few weeks. The dogs are always eager and approach without fear, and I start to feel as if Skeletor is walking me instead of the other way around.

I’ve never been good at keeping track of days. But since March 22, when the lockdown began in Athens, I am counting as if never before. Date and time have taken on a new urgency, as I try to calculate the right moments to leave the house.

For each outing, we are required to fill out a form or send a text message to the government. We must specify which of four activities we will engage in: an emergency visit to the doctor, grocery shopping, exercise, or walking a dog. The penalty for being a pedestrian outdoors without one of these reasons is a fine of €150. I’m choosing to fill out the form for now, but rumor has it that the government will require text messages from everyone soon.

So these days it takes me much longer than usual to prepare for a walk with Skeletor, because I’m fretting over what time to write on my piece of paper. How much time is enough to walk a dog in the morning? My usual morning walks would take an hour, and Skeletor needs them to let off some steam—but now an hour seems too much, a luxury. I try to bargain—maybe half an hour is good enough if I climb up the most remote part of the hill and make sure nobody is around. If I am late because I took too long to get ready, will I be lying to the police?

Skeletor appreciating the view from his walk. Courtesy of Eugenia Triantafyllou

Every few days, Greek social media and TV bulletins tell us there will be an extension of the lockdown. A few days ago we were doing well, but now the same measures are not enough anymore. We need to stay inside for longer. To be more specific about how much time we spend outside of the house, more frugal with our outings. “The next couple of weeks are critical,” the leading epidemiologist says.

But they said the same thing the week before, and the one before that.

People are confused. And worried.

My worries are not only about the authorities. In the mornings I wait until I hear my neighbor, an elderly woman with severely compromised health, go outside to feed the stray cats who depend upon her. I gave her some latex gloves a few days ago. Living in an apartment building makes it difficult to avoid bumping into each other in the entrance. So I listen for her usual sounds, imagining the scenario of not hearing her one day at all, and what I would do then. When I am sure she has finished her morning ritual and I hear the lobby door close, that is my signal to leave the house.

A few days ago, I read about an old woman in another city. She was seen walking her sheep downtown. Not a dog or even a cat. A sheep. A photograph showed her next to a building complex, the sheep grazing on some grass that grew on the lot right next to it. Her face was pixelated by the news media for privacy.

Had she always done this, before the quarantine? Perhaps. Nobody noticed then, or if they did it might have registered as something rural people did, something bucolic and colorful. Now, it is scandalous enough to make the news, one of many suddenly suspicious characters.

Another article describes a woman who was caught hiding one of her small children in the trunk of the car to escape being fined because only two people are allowed to ride together in a car. A man filled out a permit for personal exercise but was discovered by the police many kilometers away. A woman swimmer was forced to come out of the sea to be fined. The violations, according to social media, have reached 40,000, amounting to a total of €6,000,000 in fines, another number to count.

There are even priests who break the quarantine, insisting that the gathering of the congregation for the Divine Liturgy, including the Holy Communion itself, cannot possibly be a source of contagion.

Still, most Greeks are following the rules as best they can.

Greeks on Facebook protest that the government focuses too much on serving fines and policing instead of healthcare. One day the medical personnel were hailed as heroes; the next, police tried to break up their peaceful World Health Day protests. Gatherings of more than ten people are forbidden after the lockdown. Doctors and nurses gathered in the forecourt of Evangelismos, one of Athens’s big hospitals, protesting the shortages both in personnel and equipment that has been happening even before the coronavirus crisis. The government promises radical restructuring of healthcare in the next couple of months. There are plans for 500 mobile medical units that will test people for the virus at home.

As Orthodox Easter approached, the government also promised to enforce the lockdown with drones and raise the fine to €300 to deter people from leaving the cities. So people celebrated Easter on balconies and rooftops, where the traditional roasting of the lamb took place in pairs or alone.

On social media, we Greeks argue over every single piece of news. That’s nothing new. But somehow it feels more important, more pressing, to be right, to maintain a sense of control now in this chaos of information. Many call the opposite side “sheep,” an old expression for gullibility that feels as common nowadays as it is to roast one for Easter, if not to take one for a walk.

Contrary to how it might seem, we Greeks are not obsessing over sheep. But the irony of the imagery is not lost on me. People are afraid of being lambs, of being herded mindlessly and corralled inside their homes, an uncertain future ahead of them. But more than that, they are afraid of dying.

In our apartment, we don’t have a working stove yet—one of the perks of moving in just a couple of weeks before the coronavirus crisis reached Greece. We try to manage with cold food: sandwiches, fruit, some snacks from the grocery store. As Skeletor and I returned from our walk, we stopped by the small pizza place on the square. Exarchia—the neighborhood I was raised in and the only place I have lived in Greece—has a long history of anarchism and clashing with police forces. Here the lockdown, though necessary for public health, sometimes ends up scratching wounds that never healed. The virus has achieved what decades of police intervention haven’t: The square is empty except for a small squad of policemen, standing next to their motorcycles at the south side as a warning to unnecessary wanderers. They have not stopped me yet, although I carry my ID and papers with me at all times.

It’s almost eleven. I greet the woman behind the plexiglass and place my order. She offers hand sanitizer and tells me I am her first customer since she opened at 7 a.m. “It’s only pocket money now.” She shrugs.

There is talk on the news about a coronavirus subsidy for the private sector. I hope it reaches all the people who need it so they can endure for now. It’s important for everyone to endure as long as needed, to stay healthy and alive until it is okay for us to return to the world and take a look at it anew. Perhaps we’ll appreciate things we took for granted—a home cooked meal, brushing against strangers on the streets, having a cup of coffee in the sunlight, a long walk with a dog. It will be strange at first, resuming life after such a long pause. Maybe we’ll start the count anew: Which things remain lovingly, reassuringly, the same. Which ones broke during the pandemic and will need to be fixed. And which ones have always been broken but we refused to see it.

And I do hope in this restored world, the sheep will keep taking walks.

Editor’s Note, May 1, 2020: Since this piece was filed, Greece’s low death rate during the lockdown has prompted prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to announce a time frame for easing the restrictive measures imposed last month.

The post A Letter From Greece, Where Quarantined Sheep Go for Walks appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The real story is less about sheep and more about migration, desperation—and money.

In the 1850s, some Basque families, including the Altubes and the Garats, arrived in California as its mining economy expanded. These early Basques had previously fled to South America during the problematic path of transition from the old regime to a liberal state in the early 19th century. But during the gold rush, these Basques set out again, eager to join the economic exploitation of California’s land and resources. Some stayed in the West, starting business ventures in livestock ranching and related products to feed the new state’s expanding population. Today, some Basque-Americans who inherited their immigrant fathers’ or even grandfathers’ stock businesses are still raising meat on the hoof.

Still, the original Basque immigrants were not experienced sheepherders. Perhaps some had tended a few sheep in the Basque Country, but certainly none had worked as open-range sheepherders before they immigrated to the United States. Basque immigrants took on this work because it paid relatively well—largely because it was considered undesirable—and did not require special skills or a command of the English language.

By the early 1870s, California land prices and population were increasing, and the Basque stockmen moved eastward to marginal lands in the Great Basin, which the transcontinental railroad had just connected to all the major markets. In northeastern Nevada, for example, land for grazing was still plentiful and cheap. There, in Elko County, Bernardo and Pedro Altube from Oñati, a town in the province of Gipuzkoa in Basque Country, formed the partnership called Spanish Ranch. By the late 1880s, though their numbers were relatively few, a small Basque immigrant community had created an ethnic economic niche based largely on the open-range sheep industry, paving the way for further Basque immigrants by giving them employment as ranch hands.

By the 1890s, the early Basque herders were making the pattern of the “agricultural ladder” work for them and subsequent newcomers. Basque arrivals would begin by herding as wage workers—though some were compensated in lambs. Receiving their wage in lambs enabled many to operate mixed sheep bands (of both owners’ and sheepherders’ lambs), create their own sheep operations (oftentimes forming partnerships), and purchase land and property. By the early 20th century, Basque-owned sheep operations were ubiquitous in the West.

The omnipresence of Basque herders helped create a stereotype of those immigrants as having innate skills with sheep. But it wasn’t only their abilities, but also how they fit into American concepts of racial hierarchy that contributed to this myth. By the early 20th century, Basques were often depicted by non-Basque ranchers as good sheepherders who were racially superior to other non-white ethnic groups. In September 1903, the Colorado Rocky Ford Enterprise asserted that “the class of men … in demand for herding the sheep were known as Basques or ‘Bascos’ … They naturally take to the life of solitude, as they and their ancestors have been employed in a similar occupation in the Pyrennees [sic] Mountains for many years past.” This myth, based on the false premise that Basques had been sheepherders back home, came to define Basque-Americans for many Americans.

Despite the positives of the myth, the omnipresence of Basques sparked a backlash. By the 1890s, Basque herders roaming freely on public domain lands with several thousand head of sheep were perceived by the older livestock operators as a growing menace to established ranching. They were also seen as potential environmental villains by the American Conservation Movement that would form a major aspect of Progressive reform politics in the first decade of the 20th century.

When Congress and the President moved to establish forest reserves and eventually national forests in the late 19th century, issues of rangeland governance made the presence of Basque itinerant sheepherders central to local and national debates. And those arguments turned Basques into scapegoats.

Conservationists claimed that transient sheepherders were detrimental to agricultural development because they did little to build up the land. By this argument, the Basques should not be favored at the expense of the regular occupants, large or small. Local ranch owners and the small-town business communities, which depended on the prosperity of the ranges, complained to state and federal representatives. Resentment against these transients led to the occasional roughing up of sheepherders or the killing of their dogs. And most local U.S. Forest Service officials defended the idea of keeping many Basque herders out of the national forests in favor of those who had stronger ties to the local business communities. Forest rangers, in reports to their supervisors recommending the exclusion of sheep in the national forests, typically portrayed Basques as “furtive” and selfish destroyers of the environment.

In 1910, Basque immigrant Pete Jauregui built The Star Hotel in 1910 in Elko, Nevada. Courtesy of the Northeastern Nevada Museum.

This photograph of The Star Hotel was taken in 1959. The hotel is still open today. Courtesy of Northeastern Nevada Museum.

During the years before World War I, a rising wave of anti-immigrant sentiment made acceptance and integration of the Basques even more difficult. But through the 1910s, more settled Basque communities, widely dispersed throughout the West, continued to attract further emigration of Basques. These communities, often working together, developed better collective strategies to help newcomers in the transition to living in the U.S. For example, Basque-owned boarding houses offered immigrants housing, employment, social protection, and other kinds of assistance, like health care and mail service. Such boarding houses also offered to the public some traditional foods and liquors at a reasonable price through on-site bars, paving the way for closer relations between Basques and non-Basques.

As the 20th century advanced, the reputations of sheepherding and Basque culture improved. Some old Basque boarding houses were turned into Basque restaurants, which today are among the most popular ethnic businesses in the American West. For many people, these establishments—and the myth of the Basques’ special relationship to sheep—are all that remain of a far more complex history.

The post How Basques Became Synonymous With Sheepherders in the American West appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Sun Valley, Idaho, is synonymous with New West wealth, but it sits in the Wood River Valley, where more humble ranchers and farmers have long made their living. In the 1990s, as bike paths shouldered their way along a historic sheep driveway, local community members sought a way to minimize conflict between recreation and sheepherding. Hence the festival, a modern palliative to the centuries-old range wars that have occurred on sheep-raising land in the West.

“Every year our sheep are forced to travel farther and wider through the hills to avoid new housing developments and populated hiking and camping areas,” writes Diane Josephy Peavey, an Idahoan sheep farmer, who was one of the founders of the Trailing of the Sheep Festival.

The Trailing of the Sheep Festival’s roots in conflict—or in to trying forestall it—is not surprising. Sheep colonized the West before Spanish missionaries, the U.S. Army, and homesteaders did. So early did the animals arrive that in parts of the West, sheep seem ubiquitous and timeless. The Blessingway ceremony of the Diné, or Navajo, teaches that sheep helped create and define their homeland even before humans arrived.

In the American West, conflict seems to have followed sheep hoofprints like an invasive weed. This was the case, in large part, because an economic system developed by sheepherders in faraway Europe migrated, like the animals, to western American mountain ranges. Transhumance, as this system was known, had characterized pastoralism throughout the Mediterranean world for hundreds of years: Unable to sustain flocks in lowland plains, shepherds took to the mountains in summer to fatten the animals.

With the sheep came itinerant sheep tenders, as well as ecological problems, transforming the Western highlands. In New Mexico territory, 619,000 sheep in 1870 grew to nearly five million in less than two decades. Herders drove bands of 2,000 sheep into high elevations, where they devoured ripening grasses in one area after another. Gregarious animals who stay close together, sheep often devastated a range quickly, consuming plants before they could reproduce. Their ravenous appetites were matched by their tough hooves, which disrupted and compacted the soil, worsening erosion and preparing the way for invasive weeds.

Navajos shearing their sheep. Southern Navajo Agency, 1933. Image courtesy of Department of the Interior. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Portland Area Office. Salt Lake City Extension and Credit Office/Wikimedia Commons.

In 1879, John Muir famously called sheep “hoofed locusts.” Later, frustrated with continued damage in his beloved Yosemite Valley, Muir concluded, “As sheep advance, flowers, vegetation, grass, soil, plenty, and poetry vanish.”

Sheep herders and cattle ranchers competed for scarce labor and diminishing range resources for their herds. Much more so than cattle, sheep required careful attention in their herding, making the sheep economy more labor intensive and less profitable for investors than cattle ranching.

The two agricultural systems didn’t mix easily, with ranchers insisting that sheep and cows could not graze the same land. What’s more, the American love of private property sat uncomfortable alongside the mobility of transhumance, which involved flocks of sheep moving dozens, even hundreds, of miles over the speckled private-public landscape.

Tales of range wars have long storied the Western past. Arizona’s Pleasant Valley War through the 1880s and 1890s was one of the most famous, fictionalized by Zane Grey in To the Last Man (1922) and depicted in film 11 years later. The Oregon Sheep Shooters Association in the 1890s organized ranchers to exclude sheep—and their herders—from the new federal forest reserves (now known as national forests) along the Cascade Mountains.

Further east in that state, the Crook County Sheep Shooters told sheep herders to stay off land ranchers claimed, warning through local newspapers and in messages left on shepherds’ cabins or tents: “You are hereby notified to move this camp within 24 hours, or take the consequences.” The Sheep Shooters—“men of high ideals as well as good shots by moonlight”—reported killing between 8,000 and 10,000 sheep in 1903 and burning down camps and corrals. Control of the range was tense, serious business.

While these fights over culture, economics, and ecology seem to be a unique part of the myth of the American West, in fact they traveled with the sheep from Europe. In his classic and massive study, The Mediterranean, the French historian Fernand Braudel explored transhumance and acknowledged that the system’s practitioners were “somewhat outside society … a race apart.”

That sense of otherness, of a people apart, crossed the Atlantic. While virtually all cattle ranchers and most cowboys were white, sheep herders often included Native Americans and Hispanic and Mexican villagers for whom watching over flocks continued traditions—as well as transplants from the mountainous Basque homeland on the French-Spanish border, who took handily to shepherding after immigrating to the West.

The Basque, or Euskaldunak, were so ubiquitous as shepherds that in many parts of the West “Basque” elicits immediate associations with sheep herding. They brought a culture: Basque herders created intricate, beautiful, and sometimes ribald arborglyphs in the barks of the trees , carvings that decorated countless aspen around the West. Some remain today, a century after they were carved. Historian Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe has studied arborglyphs extensively, in California and Nevada, showing how the messages tell the story of Basques in America.

Like Native American and Hispanic herders, Basques in the West were widely considered non-white—and at a historical moment when racial identity was fraught, faced suspicion by their very existence. Unlike cowboys who symbolized freedom, sheep herders around the turn of the 20th century represented something undesirable. As historian Daniel Justin Herman argued in Hell on the Range, a study of the Pleasant Valley War, cowboys saw sheepherders as “meek, impoverished mixed-blood men, incapable of social improvement and unwilling to seek it, commanded by wealthy tyrants whose main concern was to perpetuate their tyranny.”

There were exceptions, of course: the so-called Idaho Sheep King, Andy Little, migrated to Idaho from Scotland in 1894, joining other Scottish immigrants to the Pacific Northwest and reflecting a common pattern of foreign ownership and investment in Western pastoralism. Mobility—of owners, herders, and animals—always characterized the industry. Though it was not nearly as famous as the state’s potatoes, the Idaho sheep industry thrived.

The business remained influential in the state for decades. Only in 1970, reportedly, did people finally outnumber sheep there. The transition has not always been smooth. Like the growth of shepherding in the late 19th century, the boom in Western tourism threatens a new sort of range war. The same places that worked well as summer ranges for sheep have attracted recreational activity and second homes.

Hikers, bikers, and other newcomers and visitors seldom appreciate the deep traditions carried along these trails, carved into arborglyphs, and enshrined in the Basque boarding houses of Western towns like Boise or Hailey. So, rather than run the tourists and newcomers out with threats and fists, Peavey and other modern sheep fans have invited them in, to join in watching Basque dancers or attending the Sheepherders’ Ball, complete with a lamb dinner buffet.

It’s more than just a celebration, really. Only by recognizing these constant negotiations between old and new, between animal and environment, and between tradition and innovation can we appreciate the gravity of this task of smoothing the way. Sheep paths in America have been rough for ages.

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