PCB Sheep

Postcard-book with 30 Cards to pick out.
series of pictures: sheep. By Paul Schäfer und Udo Haafke. 

Sheep
The domestic sheep was bred already nine thousand years ago from the wild sheep and is therefore considered as the oldest domestic cattle in the history of mankind. As a gregarious animal the sheep usually lives together with up to 300 members of the same species. Many of the approximately 600 races worldwide however are currently becoming extinct. Although the cloven-hoofed animals of the cavicornia family provide not only meat and wool but also leather, fat for ointments, fleece and material for strings, which makes them an extremely versatile domestic animal, mankind has apparently lost interest in the sheep, at least from the economic angle. Concerning literature the so called pastoral poetry that puts the lonely and today so rare shepherd from antiquity until the age of the late baroque in the centre of an idealistic and idyllic reality is less known today. Yet its inherent longing for the lost closeness to nature and simplicity in life is certainly still or again a main theme in the life of most of us. The need of help of the “sheep” in the proverbial characterization of the clergymen as the “shepherd of his little sheep” leads in the jargon up to the pretended “imbecility” of this animal. The vernacular however says at the same time that the wool of the sheep not only attracts happiness but even avoids diseases.
And the weather as well, according to a weather maxim, may be deduced from the behaviour of the sheep as the stubbornness of the older animals is supposed to announce coming rain. One certainly does not know every popular belief and superstition, yet the religious meaning of the sheep is still familiar to the majority. Thus the lamb is considered in Christian religion as a symbol of the death of Jesus Christ, hence our custom of eating a so called Easter lamb.