People ask me why I'm so passionate about sheep.
Here's why.
A sheep wakes up on a hillside nothing else will live on. 32-degree slopes. Acidic soil. Wind off the Atlantic. Rain in quantities most European crops would consider insulting. She walks out, eats grass nobody asked her to grow, and turns it into meat, milk, wool, lanolin, and the maintained landscape beneath her feet.
She requires no pesticides. No irrigation. No imported feed. No lab. No patent.
She takes the sun, the rain, the soil, and the specific botanical composition of a particular upland, and produces the leanest, most nutritionally complete meat in the British food supply. Every gram of lamb contains complete protein, zinc, iron, B12, selenium, and the conjugated linoleic acid your metabolism actually asked for.
She also produces, as a side effect, the landscape the tourists photograph. The wildflowers the campaigners claim to care about. The birdlife the charities fundraise on. The stone walls the poets write about. The curlew, the skylark, the golden plover, the red grouse, the hen harrier. None of it exists without her.
And we have spent the last fifty years being told this animal is wrecking the countryside.
The audacity.
I'll take my chances with the creature that has been shaping these hills for ten thousand years over the pea protein isolate that was patented in 2017.