North Ronaldsay Island sheep: For these lambs any grass is poisonous

North Ronaldsay Island sheep: For these lambs any grass is poisonous. They can only eat seaweed.

Who grazes in the meadow? That's right, horses, goats, cows and other normal herbivores. And you know what you can't find in the pastures? Sheep from North Ronaldsay Island. For these lambs, the grass has become... poisonous.

North Ronaldsay is not the nicest place in the world. It's a small island nestled in the North Sea near Scotland. It's cold, wet and very windy. But people lived there, because there was a lucrative business - the extraction of soda from algae - flourishing on the gloomy piece of land. To keep from freezing to death, people brought lambs to the island and bred them for wool.

But one day they learned how to make soda artificially, and the whole business went haywire. Thousands of people embarked on boats and left the cold land. Only a small handful of people and huge herds of sheep remained. The latter threatened to eat all of North Ronaldsay. To protect the green from the sheep, the islanders had surrounded the whole of the coast with a small stone wall 40 km long! The sheep remained outside, on a narrow strip of beach.

It was not a very humane solution - they had to die a slow and painful death from starvation. They had nothing to eat besides rocks, salt water and seaweed. But the stubborn sheep flatly refused to die. Instead of land grasses they got their organism pumped up and learned to eat underwater grass!

With starvation the sheep began to chew seaweed. Not to say it was an easy change of diet - many fell trying to digest the "gifts" of the sea. But those that survived became stronger! They rebuilt their digestion and biochemistry and learned to eat food full of chemicals.

There were two side effects of this evolution: first, the meat of the lambs acquired a spicy smell and an unusual taste, as if it had been left in a marinade. And two, sheep can never chew fresh grass again. They have remodeled their bodies to such an extent that it is now poisonous to them.

Alas, despite the sheep's best efforts, the breed is gradually dying out. On the island and beyond, no one cares about the feral animals. Their numbers are approaching six hundred. Surviving to become extinct anyway is such a sad irony.