Here in the United States, on Saturday, the streets of many of our major cities were packed with nitwits on parade. We’ve covered those events extensively, and there’s no need to rehash that here, again. No, now we must turn our attention to the streets of Madrid, Spain, where the streets were recently packed with sheep and goats, in an annual festival called “Transhumance.”
Watch:
The annual event has to do with the history of grazing lands in the area of the city, and how the animals are moved from one seasonal area to another.
Madrid’s streets were baa-dly jammed Sunday, not by protesters or soccer fans but by a flock of sheep and goats being led through the Spanish capital in an annual festival that honors the area’s rural heritage.
The ovine parade of bells, bleats, baas and horn music turned heads and drew crowds of thousands. Every year, organizers of the Transhumance Festival recreate the pastoral practice of moving livestock to new grazing grounds.
The festival also spotlights the environmental benefits of traditional grazing, in which livestock are used to clear brush and other flammable undergrowth, reducing the spread of wildfires.
The movement between seasonal pastures is called transhumance.
That’s one woolly crowd in the streets, and ewe’d better believe it. But to the locals, it’s a shear delight.
This year, wildfires in the area brought new attention to the annual event.
Juan García Vicente, an environmentalist who has taken part in the festival for three decades, said the summer’s extreme wildfire season in Spain — among the most destructive in its recorded history — reinforced the event’s ecological message.
“We have to fight this along several fronts,” Vicente said of climate change, also warning of the “total abandonment of the rural world” in Spain.
Others in attendance were simply amused by their close proximity to the sheep and goats trotting next to Madrid’s famous landmarks. This year, some 1,100 Merino sheep and 200 goats took to the streets, organizers said.
If you ask me, it’s pasture time that people started paying more attention to the rural world, without which the rest of the world would quickly grow very hungry. But this event does bring the lesson home to Madrid that the livestock growers are doing a ram-tastic job.
Read More: King Bestows Royal Title on Goat Breed
Have You Herd? Montana Man Pleads Guilty to Breeding Giant Sheep
Being the proud son of a cattleman, I tend to look at sheep and goats with some mild suspicion. There are few livestock species as dumb as a sheep, and goats present just the opposite problem: They are clever, they can climb, and if there’s anything that smells worse than an old billy goat, I’m not aware of what it might be. When I was a kid, a local family in our area kept goats. Their old billy used to love to climb the big box elder tree that overhung the highway going past their property. The old billy was known locally as “Old Stinky,” and passing under that tree, even at highway speed, required rolling up the truck windows and holding your breath if Old Stinky was in his perch.
It was really that ba-a-a-d.
Now that the annual event is out of the way, I’ve herd that the people of Madrid have a lot of cleaning up to do. Maybe they could avoid it by going on the lamb.
I’ll show myself out.
Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
Help us continue to report the truth about the Schumer Shutdown. Use promo code POTUS47 to get 74% off your VIP membership.
