From Beautiful Joe by Margaret Marshall Saunders
“Good-bye, little lambs and dear old sheep,” said Miss Laura, as her uncle opened the gate for her to leave the pasture. “I'll come and see you again some time. Now, you had better go down to the brook in the dingle and have a drink. You look hot in your warm coats.”
“You've mastered one detail of sheep-keeping,” said Mr. Wood, as he slowly walked along beside his niece. “To raise healthy sheep one must have pure water where they can get to it whenever they like. Give them good water, good food, and a variety of it, good quarters cool in summer, comfortable in winter, and keep them quiet, and you'll make them happy and make money on them.”
“I think I'd like sheep-raising,” said Miss Laura; “won't you have me for your flock mistress, uncle?”
He laughed, and said he thought not, for she would cry every time any of her charge were sent to the butcher.
After this Miss Laura and I often went up to the pasture to see the sheep and the lambs. We used to get into a shady place where they could not see us, and watch them. One day I got a great surprise about the sheep. I had heard so much about their meekness that I never dreamed that they would fight; but it turned out that they did, and they went about it in such a business-like way, that I could not help smiling at them. I suppose that like most other animals they had a spice of wickedness in them. On this day a quarrel arose between two sheep; but instead of running at each other like two dogs they went a long distance apart, and then came rushing at each other with lowered heads. Their object seemed to be to break each other's skull; but Miss Laura soon stopped them by calling out and frightening them apart.
I thought that the lambs were more interesting than the sheep. Sometimes they fed quietly by their mothers' sides, and at other times they all huddled together on the top of some flat rock or in a bare place, and seemed to be talking to each other with their heads close together. Suddenly one would jump down, and start for the bushes or the other side of the pasture. They would all follow pell-mell; then in a few minutes they would come rushing back again. It was pretty to see them playing together and having a good time before the sorrowful day of their death came.
About the Author
Margaret Marshall Saunders (1861-1947) was born in Nova Scotia, Canada, to a family whose home in Halifax earned the nickname ‘Noah’s Ark’ due to its menagerie of animals. This love of animals coloured her life and fiction and resulted in Canada’s first bestselling novel, Beautiful Joe (1893), based on the real-life story of an abused dog rescued from certain death by its new owner. By the late 1930s the book had sold over 7 million copies worldwide and raised awareness about animal cruelty on a global scale. Saunders’s success as a writer led to significant accolades, including an honorary MA from Acadia University in 1911 and a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 1934.
What we love about this passage…
Sometimes fiction surprises us with its directness in its treatment of current issues, as in this passage with its focus on animal and human relationships and the push-and-pull between seeing animals as living, sentient beings and as commodities. Through Laura and her Uncle Wood’s dialogue, Saunders skilfully navigates both perspectives on these issues while exposing the often glossed-over dependence of humans on animals. Though Mr. Wood argues earlier in this scene that animals “are dependent on us in almost every way,” he is similarly reliant on his sheep, as he admits he would “give up farming” without them.
This passage also reads as an instruction manual of sorts: a helpful guide for readers, both in a practical and welfare sense. Laura’s character and Joe’s final wistful and foreboding comment about “the sorrowful day of their death” explodes any sense of an idyllic nature scene in which the realities of agriculture are hidden from the public eye. Instead, Saunders cuts through sentimentality with matter-of-fact realism, laying bare the interdependence of humans and other animals.
To Read Alongside…
Other writers of popular stories about animals include Anna Sewell’s equine autobiography, Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, the Autobiography of a Horse (1877), or works by Saunders’s fellow Canadians, Ernest Thompson Seton’s Wild Animals I Have Known (1898) and Charles G.D. Roberts’s Kindred of the Wild (1902).
If you just want more about sheep, have a look at Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)—especially the hair-raising episode near the beginning when a shepherd’s trainee sheepdog goes berserk and drives an entire herd of sheep off a cliff—or Susan Glaspell’s early novel Fidelity (1915), where sheep figure fleetingly but indelibly as a woman helplessly watches her flock huddle together in the freezing cold winter night and can do nothing to prevent the inevitable deaths of the ones on the margins. Both authors use animals to express a kind of ‘biological pessimism’ about nature and the need for humans to allow natural processes to take place, even if they might seem cruel.
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Dr Lauren Cullen specialises in nineteenth-century literature and culture, animal studies, and the environmental humanities, as well as histories of colonialism and discourses of sustainability, climate, and food.
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