Interesting Facts

According to a survey carried out by the sustainable food and farming organisation Leaf (Linking Environment and Farming), more than one in three British children have never heard the classic farmyard sounds in real life. (Increasingly, youngsters are only hearing the sound of nature through their computer or TV screen, which means they have never heard a real cow go “moo”, a sheep go “baa”, or a pig go "oink". This means many kids are oblivious to where the food they eat comes from.  25% didn't know the names for baby cows, sheep, pigs or chickens, and more worryingly one in five had no idea bacon comes from pigs, while one in 20 thought we get cheese from them. Pig cheese? Eew! My favourite was that 5% percent of the children surveyed believed strawberries grow inside the fridge.  Which has a certain logic to it.  At least they had thought about it a bit.) 

According to research from from the University of Leicester, rodents could evolve to fill niches as larger mammals go extinct. (The largest extinct rodent known to science was Josephoartegasia monesi. It lived three million years ago, was larger than a bull, and weighed over a ton. Like its modern-day relative, the sheep-sized capybara, it lived in South America. Gigantism is a well known evolutionary response that occurs when a small creature steps into an ecological niche left by a larger species. Rats the size of sheep!  If that isn't a good enough reason to protect the elephant, rhino and other species from extinction, I don't know what is.)

Haggis from Scotland has been banned in the USA for 40 years. (It was banned because the US Food Standards Agency prohibits sheep lung in food products.   You see!  Sometimes America gets it right!)

You can make paper from sheep's poo . (In fact you can make paper from many different sources, wood (of course), plants (even bananas) and animal excrement, like elephant dung. Just make sure what kind of paper it is before you lick the envelope.)

According to McKinsey Quarterly New Zealand's sheep outnumber the people by 13:1. (New Zealand - where the men are men and the sheep are nervous.)