In a heartbreaking yet somehow stomach churning scene, a local man, Jed Snopes, 56, completely broke down as he admitted to his open-mouthed fellow ranchers that ever since he was a young boy and that old ram at the Festoon place chased him across the pasture and into that old, decrepit barn that he has had a paralyzing, bone-chilling, nearly incapacitating fear of all things 'sheep'. "Oh, man..! Do I really have to talk about this?" said Jed with that all-too familiar look of a cornered, terrified animal on his sweat-soaked face. "I don't know what it is! I don't! It's that creepy wool and those disgusting hooves and the fact that they drink water like a camel! I don't know! The whole darn animal just scares me to the very marrow of my bones! Oh, and that constant bleating and baying and the fact that when they are scared the whole darn flock just seems to move like one organism - as if the whole darn mess is being controlled by some vastly superior yet decidedly diabolical intelligence hell-bent on my personal destruction. Its all just so wrong and you can't make me like it. You can't!!! You can't!" he stammered hysterically while gulping huge drafts of air thru his now-bloodless lips. "Oh, and as cruel fate would have it, all the really cool ranchers around these parts raise sheep so the wife is constantly nagging at me to sell those smelly cows and join the 'hip crowd' of sheep farmers" said the obviously broken man. "I have been married to that woman for 26 years (actually, it is 27!) and she doesn't know a thing about me! Every time she brings that up I have weeks of the night sweats and find myself curled up in the fetal position in odd places in the house - at all hours of the day or night. Can't she see what she is doing to me? Can we really be living such obviously separate lives? I would rather be naked in a pit full of cobras or be married to Hillary Clinton than to ever allow one of those cursed animals on my ranch! They would just sit there, taunting me with their goat-like eyes, biding their time with the patience of the devil himself, just waiting for a moment of weakness so they could all charge me and hold me down so that they could breathe that sweet-smelling yet poisonous 'sheep-breath' into my face until in my madness I willingly gave up my very soul!" said the surprisingly unstable and darn-near certifiable mental 'basket case'. "No sir, I am a cattle man, through and through! And this is one leopard that ain't changing his spots, let me tell you!" he said with a now rare display of calm and sane resolve.
(Note: Special thanks for this article goes to Gayle of Pacific County for her keen insights and valued research into the obviously complex and multi-dimensional man/sheep power-sharing relationship.)
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