Siegfried and Roy pose with Pride, another white lion, in an undated photo.
Photograph: Getty Images
A white lion on loan from the Siegfried and Roy animal and magic act has died
after undergoing a medical procedure at the Toledo Zoo.
Zoo officials announced Friday that 14-year-old Legend died after being
immobilized for an hour to allow veterinarians to treat problems with one of its
paws. Legend went into cardiac and respiratory arrest after being removed from
anesthesia.
A zoo veterinarian says in a statement that while there are risks whenever
anesthesia is administered, the procedure was necessary for Legend’s quality of
life. A necropsy will be performed to determine a cause of death.
The zoo has one other white lion, Legend’s 14-year-old brother Courage. The
pair came to the zoo in 2003. A white lion named Wisdom died during surgery at
the zoo in 2013.
The relationship
between shepherds and their dogs is one of the longest-running stories in human
history. But in the US, that story paused for a while and almost looked like it
might come to an end. Since the second world war, by and large, Americans have
stopped eating sheep.
In 1945, there were 55
million head of sheep in the US. By 2013, there was around a tenth of that
number. The decline in the demand for wool led to some of the liquidation of the
sheep flock, but so did changing food tastes. Americans used to eat upwards of
4lbs of lamb in any given year, but now two out of three don’t eat any at
all.
The consumers who
still eat lamb are a now a small niche market, incorporating immigrants from
countries where lamb is a staple and foodies in search of pasture-raised
authenticity. Demand is slowly regaining strength, along with a growing
consciousness about the provenance of animals and the conditions they’re raised
under.
Michelle Canfield, sheep farmer, with Bronte (right) and
Moses . Photograph: Jason Wilson for The Guardian
For farmers like
Michelle Canfield, who since 2008 has run a small herd of sheep near Snohomish,
Washington, it brings both opportunities and constraints.
First, she runs
“shedding sheep”, which drop their hair, meaning she doesn’t have to pay to
shear them. Hers are Katahdin Hair Sheep, first developed in Maine and prized
for their prolific lambing and easy-care characteristics.
Second, the absence of
a USDA-approved slaughterhouse close by means that if you want to eat her sheep,
you have to take them away and get them butchered yourself. She doesn’t have a
problem selling them – Seattle is close by, she says, where “the Muslim market
is huge” (she says it is thanks to the number of migrants who have moved to work
in the tech industry).
As much as any other
foodies, this highly educated clientele “want their grass-fed, natural, local
meat, but they want to do their own slaughter, and make sure it’s Halal”.
This “exploding
demand” for strictly grass-fed animals means that she has to leave the flocks
out in the fields full time, including overnight. In turn, the animals are
vulnerable to predators, particularly in lambing season. The most dangerous,
persistent and clever predator of lambs is the coyote.
Canfield tried llamas
as guardian animals, and they worked for a while, but the coytoes worked out how
to get around them at the same time her border collies did. She started to take
losses.
Lockjaw traps are
illegal, and poison is fraught with risks, so she needed another solution.
This is where Moses
and Bronte came in. Both dogs are around eight years old, weigh in well over 100
pounds and are off-white in colour (so they can be distinguished from
predators). Each is descended from two different ancient lines of livestock
guardian dogs.
Moses (left) and
Bronte resting in the grass. Photograph: Jason Wilson for The Guardian
Bronte, the Maremma,
was the first dog Canfield adopted . Maremmas are an ancient central Italian
breed, created to protect the flocks of Abruzzo, Tuscany and Lazio, a job they
still do in a country where wolves are present and protected.
Bronte had been raised
in the traditional manner of guardian sheepdogs, in a barn with sheep to whom
she was bonded. She loved Canfield’s flock, but she had to learn to cool her
exuberance. “She tried to play with them, she’d want to wrestle with them, even
the lambs.” She was challenging and wilful. “She went feral for a while and I
had to retame her with food.”
It worked, and now
Bronte attends to the flocks dutifully and gently. She looks and acts a little
like an oversized Golden Retriever, one who “perceives the sheep as her primary
peer group”.
To keep her company,
and to help at the times when they needed to split up the flocks, they got
Moses, a Kuvasz. They are a Hungarian breed whose precise origins are lost in
time, but who are said to have arrived with the Magyars in the Carpathian Valley
some 4,000 years ago.
Kuvasz almost
disappeared in the second world war, when many were killed by German or Russian
soldiers for protecting their families. There were revived, and now they are
another part of the array of working dogs available to livestock ranchers.
Moses was a failed
show dog; he was too reactive and grumpy for the ring. When Canfield acquired
him, she quickly realised what the problem was: “He’s terribly far-sighted. He
was growly at dog shows because everything up close was just a jumble of stuff.
He’s worked out well here.” The fact that he has learned to be a guardian
despite not being raised as one is a tribute to Canfield’s training.
While other breeds of
guardian dogs might be more assertive and aggressive, these two mostly get the
job done with their booming barks. A bark is enough to warn Canfield (“I’ve
learned to tell which kind of bark means trouble”) and is also enough to scare
off a coyote. They haven’t yet had to physically tangle with a predator.
Looking to the future,
Canfield worries about wolves. “We’ll see how quickly they make it out here”,
she says. Reintroduced in Idaho and the still-protected apex predator, wolves
are slowly making their way west of the ranges. They’re already in western
Oregon, and one day, perhaps, they will show up in her corner of Washington.
Perhaps the same
conflicts that have played out in eastern Oregon and Washington between
conservationists and ranchers will play out closer to the big cities of the
Pacific Northwest, or maybe by then new techniques and new dogs will provide a
solution.
For now, these two
dogs are happy sleeping, living and eating with their flocks. Soon, Canfield
will introduce a new puppy who will learn from them – which is how a tradition
as old as domestication itself will be renewed.
