My co-worker recently came back from London and brought me back a copy of the Daily Express. In it was the following article, published on May 24, 2010:
Ten Things you never knew about…sheep
William Hartston
On May 24, 1830, exactly 180 years ago today, Sarah Josepha Hale published her poem Mary Had A Little Lamb
- The poem is based on a real incident in which an American girl called Mary Sawyer caused a commotion by taking her pet lamb to school
- There are 200 mentions of sheep and 188 of lambs in the Bible, making them by far the most frequently mentioned animal.
- Until 1818 in Britain, you could be hanged for the crime of sheep-stealing
- Research shows that a sheep can remember the faces of 50 other sheep for more than two years
- It is untrue that there is no English word that rhymes with ‘silver’: a chilver is a ewe-lamb.
- Half-a-gallon of diesel fuel can be made from the fat of an average lamb. In 1986, a test fleet of 40 New Zealand lorries averaged 10 miles per lamb.
- On July 22, 1918, in the Wasatch National Park in Utah, 504 sheep were killed by lightning.
- At a dinner served in honour of the King of France, Henry VIII once served a feast including 2,000 fish, 1,000 sheep and a dolphin.
- There are about 13 sheep for every person in New Zealand but in the Falkland Islands there around 300 times as many sheep as people.
- The dwarf blue sheep is found only in Tibet
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