A British farmer says his flock of rare sheep have become “fashion icons all around the world.”
“We bought a new sheep feeder, and I noticed when I walked past them in the field that a lot of them had pink heads,” Richard Nicholson, owner of Cannon Hall Farm in Barnsley, U.K., told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.
“I didn’t put two and two together initially.”
The feeder is bright red, and Nicholson believes the paint has been rubbing off on his flock while they feed.
“They’ve got very attractive pink hairdos now, so we’re quite pleased with that,” he said.
The sheep, he says, appear to be pleased as well.
“I think they enjoy it. I’ve seen them skipping around in the field today,” Nicholson said.
Nicholson owns a flock of Valais blacknose sheep, a rare breed originally from the Swiss Alps. Sometimes called “the cutest sheep in the world,” they’re shaggy and white all over, except for their jet-black faces and matching spots on their legs.
They were historically raised for both meat and wool, but Nicholson says he sells them mostly to people who want to keep them around as companions.
“We’ve been breeding them to try and bring the numbers back up again, and a lot of people are buying them just because they look so attractive in the fields,” he said.
“For a while, we were selling a lot of llamas and alpacas as exotic pets, but now it seems to be Swiss Valais sheep that they’re going for.”
It’s no mystery why, he says.
“They are quite fun animals to watch,” he said. “Sometimes, you’ll find them sticking their tongue out at you.”
The pink hair likely isn’t permanent, but Nicholson joked he might have to keep painting their feeder different colours to produce new coifs.
But he says there’s something special about the pink.
“They [look] a bit like Blondie in the 1970s,” he said, referring to the U.S. rock band’s lead singer, Debbie Harry. “She used to have a bit of a pink tint to her hair, and they look quite a lot like her.”