ATTITUDE AND PERCEPTION
How Seen?
During a season from late March to early October, The Sheep Show tours Great Britain. It is deemed by its provider to be ‘educational’ and ‘fun’. It appears that The Sheep Show is liked by people. How, through sight and interpretation, do we think the sheep participants are regarding being in the Show?
The Sheep Show is a long-running entity. Since 2022, the owner has been Trevor Wayborn, a person ‘who always kept sheep alongside the day job’ [being a paramedic], who did contract shearing, and who has ‘experience in the theatre’ (The BV Magazine, 8th September 2023). Certain information and perspective are being presented to the audience of The Sheep Show. Considerable amount of basic detail about sheep is told - that they need shearing for welfare reasons, the risk of flystrike, etc. But, talk of chops, and most of what the Show consists, conveys ‘showmanism’. The audience is being encouraged to see sheep as funny. It is being entertained.
Sheep of various breeds are brought on stage, are put to stand on individual platforms, are chained to the chain collars that they are wearing. Food for each sheep is the mechanism for the sheep to be managed and controlled. As Trevor said to The BV Magazine, in relation to the process of getting the sheep trained, ‘The sheep start to learn there is food available, and soon learn that repetitive behaviour gets rewarded. They just know they will get fed – and they love it!’.
Speaking of the sheep’s intelligence, Trevor tells The BV Magazine, ‘The sheep know exactly what order they come up in, and when they hear their music they get up and get ready to go on the stand. It’s really cool to see the sheep adopt this behaviour in the show because they enjoy it. They even go to sleep up there ….They have favourite music too. They love a bit of Taylor Swift! And they like Kenny Loggins’ Footloose, too. As soon as we put Taylor Swift on they all get up and start. And when Footloose comes up they know its dancing time. You can see them look at each other and say “Here we go!” ’. So, Trevor is seeing music as, too, an item to use to make the sheep do what he needs them to do.
Trevor talks of what delivering the Show involves, saying this: ‘A lot of preparation is involved in performing at a show. The lorries have to be ready. We need hay, water and feed. And then we need enough food and stuff for the humans - we can be away at shows for ten-day stretches.’
The format of the Show is to bring sheep one at a time on to the stage on to their respective platforms where there is food for them. Then another sheep is taken from a ‘cupboard’ and is shorn. (When I saw The Show last week the sheep being shorn was a five-month-old lamb. Generally in sheep farming, shearing of lambs is not done at this young age.) The finale of the performance is the team member moving along the row of sheep with a bucket of food, encouraging them to do the shuffle, to ‘dance’.
To my mind the demeanour of the sheep during the time when they are on stage - and other than when they are engaged in eating - is that of being ‘spaced out’. It is as if they have ‘switched off’.
For travel, sheep are put in the, altered, performance portion of the purpose-built vehicle. At shows and events, when not performing, the sheep are in two groups behind the trailer: in one pen are those to be sheared at some time or which have already been shorn at some time; in another pen are the, representative of sheep breeds/types, performers. It can be seen that the sheep are well cared for there. They have hay to eat.
Travelling confined in a trailer, for up to ten days at a time; when on arrival being at a strange place, and in a pen with shelter rather than at pasture; being on stage; cannot be pleasant for the sheep of The Sheep Show. If weather is very hot, such as in this summer of 2026 in Great Britain, all must be worse for them, especially for those with longer fleeces.
The Sheep Show seems like a product not appropriate to our present day. Whereas dancing bears are almost totally something of the past, nowadays we have The Sheep Show with dancing sheep. Circuses with wild animals are not allowed now in Great Britain, and albeit that - sadly and astoundingly - domestic animals are still permitted to be in a circus in Great Britain.
And, as well as Attitude and Perception let us is consider how many other concerns The Sheep Show raises. They are: Truth To Their Nature, Being Used, Transportation And Journey, Maltreatment, Entertaining, Education, Speciesism, Climate Change, Rights, Cruelty.
The Sheep Show owner seems not to see anything wrong with the Show and its style and way of operation. From the Show’s popularity, it would appear that the general-public audience does not perceive the sheep to be being treated inappropriately, or else does not care if the sheep are undergoing the type of use. The sheep must mind.
3rd September 2026