Greening the Desert - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 70

The main agent of these transformations is an animal which, like
the flayed hills, we have come to accept as part of the fabric of British
life: a woolly ruminant from Mesopotamia. No wild animal resem-
bling the sheep has ever existed in Britain or western Europe. (The
musk ox, which belongs to the same sub-family as sheep and goats,
probably comes closest, but it has a different ecology and set of habi-
tat preferences.) The mouflon, the 'wild' sheep of Corsica and Cyprus,
is in fact one of the earliest examples of a feral invasive species: a
descendant of animals which escaped from domestic herds during the
Neolithic. 9
Because they were never part of our native ecosystem, the vegeta-
tion of this country has evolved no defences against sheep. In the
uplands they rapidly deplete nutritious and palatable plants, leaving
behind a remarkably impoverished flora: little beside moss, moor-
grass and tormentil in many places. The sheep has caused more
extensive environmental damage in this country than all the building
that has ever taken place here.
The horses watched as wild animals watch, ears pricked and turned
towards us, eyes locked, occasionally tossing their heads and snorting,
ready to flee. But when we squatted down and waited, they began to
move towards us. A careless movement scattered them. They swirled
away then stopped a little distance off, regrouped, edged towards us
again, chewing, snorting, stamping, tossing. So powerful did their
curiosity seem, so much more powerful than their evident fear, that it
was almost as if, like us, they craved this contact with another
species.
A wisp of wind blew over us towards them. They twitched and
flared their nostrils, tubes of muscle flexing all the way up their long
faces. I was struck by this thought: that if you landed on an unknown
continent and saw the mammals or birds that lived there, you could
tell immediately whether they were predators or prey. The eyes of the
eaten are on the sides of their heads, as they need a wide range of
vision. The eyes of the eaters are at the front, as they need to focus to
catch their quarry.
Ritchie had brought me to the land on which he had once lived, and
where, with others, he had shut out the sheep and begun replanting,