Sheepwrecked - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 155

lowed by grouse shooting and deer stalking - for the sad state of the
British uplands. Partly as a result of their assaults, Wales now pos-
sesses less than one-third of the average forest cover of Europe. 1 Their
husbandry is the greatest obstacle to the rewilding I would like to see.
To identify the sheep as an agent of destruction is little short of
blasphemy. In England and Wales the animal appears to possess full
diplomatic immunity. Its role in the dispossession of many of the
people who once worked on the land, as the commons were enclosed
by landlords hoping to profit from the wool trade, is largely forgot-
ten. This is what Thomas More wrote in Utopia , published in 1516:
Your sheep, that were wont to be so meek and tame and so small eaters,
now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers, and so wild, that they
eat up and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, des-
troy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities. For look in what parts
of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore dearest wool, there
noblemen and gentlemen, yea and certain abbots, holy men no
doubt . . . leave no ground for tillage, they inclose all into pastures; they
throw down houses; they pluck down towns, and leave nothing stand-
ing, but only the church to be made a sheep-house . . . the husbandmen
be thrust out of their own, or else either by cunning and fraud, or by
violent oppression they be put besides it, or by wrongs and injuries they
be so wearied, that they be compelled to sell all: by one means therefore
or by other, either by hook or crook they must needs depart away. 2
In Scotland, where the Clearances were more sudden and even
more brutal than the enclosures in England and Wales, some people
remain aware of the dispossession and impoverishment caused by
sheep farming. But in Wales, though sheep have replaced people since
the Cistercians established the Strata Florida abbey in the twelfth cen-
tury, and though these enclosures were bravely resisted by riots and
revolts such as Rhyfel y Sais Bach (the War of the Little Englishmen)
in what is now Ceredigion in 1820, 3 the white plague has become a
symbol of nationhood, an emblem almost as sacred as Agnus Dei, the
Lamb of God, 'which taketh away the sin of the world'. I have come
across a similar fetishization in Australia and New Zealand, North
America, Norway, the Alps and the Carpathians.
There is a reason for this sanctification, but it is rapidly becoming