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Beekissed
Mountain Sage
That's what I said...I think CC was interrupted mid thought? All the while I was growing up, my parents always awakened us with this statement, "Rise and shine!!! We are wasting daylight!" even when it wasn't even daylight yet! Dad often expected us to work an hour or two before breakfast to "work up an appetite", which was entirely unnecessary...no one in our family ever had to "work up" an appetite.
So, when I got these sheep I noticed right off hand, when the black one was brought into the daylight and out of the darkness of her home barn, her fur just shown and glistened in the sun. It was unexpected in a sheep, as their hair/wool tends to be a little nappy rather than slick and shiny, particularly the black ones.
Rose, on the other hand, had slick hair/fur but didn't shine like the black ewe....but when we tried to move her to the truck, she was the most problematic. She reared up like a wild horse, threw herself onto the ground and rolled around, tried to run through us and away from us...not exactly what one would expect from an oldster like her.
So, when thinking of a name for Shine(and the previous owner said she was the "most shy"...but I didn't want to name her Shy), her name kind of popped into my head....Shine. We have a habit of naming animals with people names around here and I struggle to get away from it but tend to lapse back into it anyway. Shine seemed pretty far away from that...but as soon as I said "Shine" in my mind, my memory completed the word with "Rise and shine!!!!" I'd heard so many times from my youth.
Can't really call a sheep "Rise"...doesn't mean much. So, considering the oldster was so prickly and hard to handle(not because she was as lovely as a Rose, that's for sure...I find her a not very attractive sheep, actually), I was thinking "Rose"...that's acceptable as an animal name, not always used as a person's name and goes well with Shine. Rose and Shine!
Names sometimes have a self fulfilling prophecy type of thing, so when one names a dog Killer or Cujo, oft times that dog is approached with fear by others and it gives a dog a leadership role it wouldn't normally have.... and can turn the dog exactly into what his name describes. A nasty dog.
Didn't want to call a sheep Shy nor one Thorny, as both of those names have a negative association when it comes to livestock~no one wants a fearful nor dangerous sheep. Would I be expecting Shy to always be fearful, so not expect her to eventually tame down and become more easy to handle? Would I always be expecting trouble from a sheep called Thorny or any reference to her bulky nature or not so pretty appearance? Would I get a different result than I wanted with these negative descriptor names? I'm thinking yes. They say one should picture what they WANT rather than what they currently have, if one is to have success with an animal.
I know...my mind works in convoluted ways and often doesn't shut down, so I'm left with random neurons firing throughout the day and night.
But, that's the origin of those names. So far Shine is still more shy than Rose...but Rose is taming down very well. She's not any more beautiful to me yet but I find myself growing more fond of her by the day. Shine is beautiful to me, but represents a challenge to me to win her over and to have her trust me so that her name fits her in all ways. I don't want her to always be shying away from me.
Goats redefine "permanent"
