Toward A Multi-Species & Apocalyptic Shepherdcraft

shorter version originally posted on the Queer Nature Critical Naturalist blog

I was initiated into earth-based skills by sheep. 🐑 I worked as a shepherd seasonally throughout college as a way to connect with my Balkan ancestral life ways.
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In particular I worked with small dairy flocks who were part of projects that were building soil (& carbon) through “mob stocking” or rotational grazing, which is more similar to how wild ungulates graze. To me that relationship allowed me to see the toxic madness of Western culture’s war against animism and ecology, and one of the ways that manifests is the way we treat animals, and sheep in particular (even though the main religions of Western civ are full of sheep and lamb imagery). It’s really sad how we project so much of our shadow onto sheep, especially with regard to our fears about our own complicity and conformity. But sheep actually take care of us, and particularly for me they took care of my ancestors and I consider them my indirect ancestors. There are a lot of stories of human societies being soulmates with a hooved species, and ours in Southeastern Europe was distorted by the processes of empire, but it’s still there, if you choose to look for it.
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Sheep also help provide a model of how I, as a queer person who probably won’t biologically reproduce, can be an ‘indirect’ ancestor to others, human and non. Sheep teach about the intelligence of the collective, they teach how ecological knowledge can be stored in the body, they teach about trust, accountability, and interspecies community. They also really teach about the gifts of fear and vigilance. Sheep have mad survival skills. There is a reason Cretan shepherds during WW2 were a key part of one of the most remarkable guerrilla operations in European history. Because they saw and experienced the land, the terrain through the eyes of the sheep. They moved like water over fierce rock and hot slope, because the sheep do. Small ruminants are the water, the blood of the land. In being shepherds, the Cretans were shepherded *by* these animals that have become a metaphor for stupidity to many contemporary people.
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Exploring mysticism as an ecological role is a big part of my and our work. My work with sheep was really about me realizing that I would do anything for them, which is along the lines of the old, esoteric understanding of shepherding. We have dozens of portals to mysticism but one of them is surrendering your life to an Other who is beyond human, whom you love very much and whom reminds you, in a way, how to be human, who keeps you accountable to life.
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That is why I have the words “Shepherd” engraved inside my wedding ring. No, being a shepherd is not necessarily about control, power, and dominance. It’s not just about “Jesus” or Kings (what if you considered that the kings and church heirarchs that interpreted millennial/apocalyptic spiritual movements for their own gain *used* an *already very powerful and potent symbol* to *consolidate power.?*) Yeah, the Big Stories would have you believe a lot of bullshit about sheep and our relationship to them and what it means. (But the Big Stories didn’t uplift queer or non-binary shepherds either.) In the end, if that had me reject the whole topic out of hand, that would have been a “win” for the dominators of “nature” who don’t want anyone in an oppressed or minoritized position to be #dreampunks and interpret ecology and mythology for themselves and their own liberation.
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It would be convenient if it was all that simple as Shepherd = Overlord, but it’s not. It’s an open secret among the old guard of “European” shepherds that we serve the cloven-Hooved ones. And of course there is an aspect of trauma bonding in domestication, and in our relationship with sheep. Let’s also talk about that rigid, shame-rooted tendency to just label things as trauma-derived and walk away, as if that’s supposed to be a moral judgement and set all the healing in motion. Try to tell any group of folks that have escaped disaster together and become interdependent that their relationship is co-dependent. Yeah, no it doesn’t work like that. Us and sheep? What if we’re escaping the disaster of civilization’s biggest toxicities together. Slowly, because it won’t happen overnight like in the movies. And I think it’s possible , but it’s a science fictional future, where we graze our micro-flocks in abandoned cities. Shepherding is a problematic paradigm when the shepherds are always white, male, heterosexual, or abusive. But we can at least try to imagine alternatives.
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We also must pause for a moment to note that many Americans have never experienced flocks mostly used for milk or wool, much less carbon (grass) farming. And with carbon farming, some of that is known now through the work of some cattle ranchers but small ungulates like sheep provide many benefits to the land like small hooves and small high nitrogen, harder poop that disturb the soil less. Many ancestral shepherds also used mixed sheep & goat flocks which is also better ecologically because they eat different things. Some people think ranching and herding is about growing meat. Animals with short lives, not given a chance at deep multi species relationship with us. Well, in ancient times my ancestors would rarely keep a flock only for meat. When you are around a dairy flock you have constant contact with them, with these many gentle mothers, and you see a whole different side of them than if you were just looking at them as future meat. And you form attachments you never would otherwise. Attachments that will surprise you with their depth.
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I don’t see shepherding as humans necessarily using another species for their survival. Of course most animal farming is extractive and massive and terrible—but saying that is the easy part! I see that there is *also* the possibility of co-survival, when there is respect, reverence, and love. The kind of multi species kinship that Donna Haraway talks about. It’s a pretty funny paradox from an anti-civ perspective that both Pinar and I became enamored of this work through our (separate!) relationships with sheep. We are still trailing these mythic story lines, still figuring it out, and we don’t have all the answers. But we do know that our time as shepherds is borrowed time from the Mother of Life and Death. For a short time (our lifetimes) her rocks become bones and hooves, her soil becomes wool and flesh, and her water becomes blood. And for a time we protect her. She allows us to. She gives us the gift of imitating a fraction, *a fraction* of what she does on a daily basis. And one day we will return to her, and our flesh will become grass. And the herbivores will do what they do, converting cellulose to a more bioavailable form, without which many predators and omnivores would not be able to access much of the biomass on earth. No big deal...
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When Pınar worked as a shepherd for a Diné elder and master weaver at Black Mesa, they saw a different side of shepherding too. The less told side. The side where people marginalized by the US government already ARE living with sheep post-apocalyptically. Sheep and goats being among the only creatures that can convert the desert plant life to forms more bioavailable for human and other then human use. And as Pınar often tells, looking at all those imprints of hooves in the sandy soil day after day was what calibrated their mind for tracking. The elder they lived with would say that looking at the ground is them reading the newspaper every morning. When you are a shepherd you have to pay attention to where the sheep go, to their tracks. The critics are just going to say that this is because we are protecting our property. But have they ever considered that we see the sheep as our siblings, our aunties and mothers? What about how the sheep teach us to identify plants, to navigate, to find our way home? When we forget those things they’ll teach us again. Yes, there is a story there beyond trauma, beyond control. The ironic part is that at this point in the project of late capitalist civilization hardly anyone around us is experiencing this relationship anymore, much less folks with some sort of access to media platforms, so the ones in power and the ones making stories, the loud voices, will define for us something we never even experienced.
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To understand how we somatically, emotionally relate to sheep we have to look at how we often relate to an animal who occupies a similar niche, another medium-sized herbivore, the deer.

If you spend any time reading hunting magazines or on forums in the U.S. and if you think critically, beyond just what is told to you, you’ll quickly realize that deer actually occupy a liminal space between wild and domesticated. They are often highly adapted to human habitats, and many hunters essentially “farm” them by planting and tending legume, grass, and other crops specifically intended for wild animals, called food plots — yes, they’re actually called that! Hunters are known to seed white clover, trefoil, and even well known food crops like turnips and other brassicas, for deer and elk to feed on. We do this to draw the deer to us — to entice them, because usually it is we who are drawn to them, otherwise.

I don’t intend to say that this crypto-farming is good or bad. That’s not the point, and actually, almost everyone who does this mindfully, whether you agree with the theory or practice of it or not, does care about helping support a thriving deer herd and do imagine themselves as participating in a future sustainable harvest. What we are getting at here is the emotional energy that exists between humans and deer. And very often, for those that respect them (whether that includes choosing to eat them or not), it is a relationship characterized by awe, and definitely Eros. It has a shadow side, too, you see it in the territoriality where humans act out their entitlement to the bodies of deer and elk by projecting hate onto other large predators — the alleged ‘competitors’ of humans, the Beloved’s “other suitors” so to speak. This partially explains the cross-species envy humans feel toward wolves.

And on that note, we always assume the wolves and mountain lions control how the deer herds move, but what if it also went the other way? I see the lions follow the deer. At least, here, where we still have a migratory herd. Ecologically, the cloven hooved are the parents of the land, they are the ones that pull others toward them. They are the ones who make way. Literally. They make way, they make trails. They have a creative power so big we fail to recognize it. We just keep thinking that predators control things, and this causes us all sorts of problems.

We’ve talked much about the “ecology of fear” — what also of the ecology of eros? That is the force of the cloven-hooved, of the animals we call “prey.”

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It’s hard to deny that a huge amount of people find it deeply comforting to be in the presence of medium to large herd herbivores. I believe our nervous systems are deeply intertwined. Some people will make this into a good or a bad thing. What if it was a little more neutral. People wag their fingers at “trauma bonding” as if it’s something you should avoid in your diet. There are a lot of ancestors who would scoff at such self righteousness.

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Whitetail deer are 3.5 million years old. That’s why they break so many hearts, and they’ll outlive us, too.

What would it be like to surrender to the herbivores?

It sounds nice.