Gay sheep romp turns Tyneside blue

A North Tyneside farmer is evidently unaware of the extensive research which has been dedicated to probing the delicate matter of ovine homosexuality, and has dismissed clear evidence of his flock indulging in boy-on-boy as a simple bit of rough and tumble The rams in question, in Dudley, near Cramlington, had been marked with …

[Scott]

Ewe Stars

Just in!!! Gay Ewes to star in new blue movie.

[Anonymous Coward]

Smell the money

A largely unmolested ewe !!

How many Welsh and Kiwi bidders will that get on ebay?

[Alan Fisher]

eh?

Why does anyone care unless this happens to be a new line in pron someone is considering??

I think Ricky Gervase said it better than anyone else could in his Animals show.....

Note: does that make my dog a limbosexual? or softfurnishingosexual? or anythingthatmovesrightosexual? I think domesticated animals, under what are considered unnatural conditions, tend to behave quite differently to their wild cousins....has David Attenborough even shown us a gay chimp orgy?

[Anonymous Coward]

bored?

you twisted a story into complete bollocks and the IT angle is escaping me atm

[Frank]

Ewe must be joking

Let me be the first to say it.....that ewe is damn ugly, no wonder she only got a light brush of blue, probably where she was pushed out of the way.

As for the rams, we haven't been told where they were painted with blue dye. They can't have been dipped because their feet are still white. As a mating marker, the obvious place to paint them would be on their lower stomach. (Before anybody tries to say they were held upside down by their feet and dipped, note that the tops of their backs have no dye).

Since there is no 'before' picture, we have no way of telling how much blue was on originally and how much might have been transferred by ram-ram contact.

From the linked picture, they seem to have been extensively and evenly painted. I reckon some less than bright farmhand thought it was a decorating job rather than an attempt at scientific monitoring. This exercise needs to be repeated and done properly by people who have at least a clue. I'm free next week so can you forward my e-mail address and this comment to the farmer ?

[W]

Why so sheepish?

The Metro paper today (I know...) didn't give a back story to this - they just said that the sheep were indulging in a spot of rough and tumble and got covered in blue dye. Written as if they bumped into a shelf with pots of dye on whilst fighting. Their website expands on this a little (@ http://tinyurl.com/447xga)

The BBC goes with this "fighting angle" too. As does the Press Association, the Mail, and the Mirror. No mention of boy on boy.

Although the statement that "around half a dozen of the flock of around 60 sheep were completely covered in blue" bolsters the one in ten theory.

Why are the news outlets so sheepish about the "truth" behind this story?

I, for one, welcome our gay, blue, cloud-like overlords.

[Vladimir Plouzhnikov]

Colour blue

Funnily enough, blue is the colour usually used to symbolise homosexuality in Russia (instead of pink)...

[Marvin the Martian]

Where did this one come from?

Ok, so now you get even below Daily HateMail standards in reporting? You know that the evidence for sex is a vague blue spot on the back, so completely blue sheep is proof of lots-of-sex? Sheesh.

Go back to reporting on Emmerdale Farm as you were doing earlier this week.

[Anonymous Coward]

Enough about the gay sheep.

How much blue dye was on the farmer?

Mine's the tweed one with the binding twine in the pockets

[E_Nigma]

Yeah, Right

Those rams were painted by a man, either with real paint or in Photoshop (or, perhaps GIMP). The paint job is just too perfect.

[Simon]

So it starts as...

Gay Sheep Romp Sex Orgy Shock Horror! story in the title

But turns out to be just plain old Sheep Having Fight, as stated in the original BBC news story.

Lester I'm so disappointed at you for trying to spice up a headline like that just to get us hooked.

Not that, like, umm, i fell for it or anything, umm, and then had to deal with the disappointment.

Still, the sight of blue sheep could be considered just a teeny bit erotic.

I may need to lie down, under my desk, for a bit, gah.

[David Harper]

Completely raddled

The dye is properly known as raddle, which means that all of the boy sheep are completely raddled.

And if you ask me, the rams in the BBC photo are all looking distinctly sheepish.

[Pascal Monett]

Sounds like fanbois material to me

Even presented with hard proof, the farmer went off on a tangent and invented some other excuse to continue clutching to his beliefs.

Yep, that's a fanbois for you. Almost a religious integrist.

[John Bayly]

@Frank

They don't paint the rams, they just strap a wax block to the their stomachs with a fetching leather ensemble (the gag is an optional extra).

Yes, I did grow up on a farm which had sheep. Never saw the rams getting covered in dye like that though.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dare I ?

Baa - back mounting ?

Ram-a-lamb-a-ding-dong ?

[Gav]

Leave it to an expert, Lester

Somehow I think a sheep farmer knows a whole lot more about the behaviour of sheep, of every kind, than an IT hack.

[StillNoCouch]

Of course ...

I'm glad they didn't sheer their wool yet since it's so cold.

You can tell it's cold 'cause the ewe's lips are blue.

[Anonymous Coward]

So you just had to ram this article through

And now you're feeling sheepish and got somebody's goat. That's a bit of wooly-headed thinking for you. I know, you're feeling baaaa'd about it.

[Geoff Kennedy]

hmmm

I'm shocked he didn't film the "fight" and post it on ewetube...

[RW]

@ Vladimir Plouzhnikov

Light blue or dark blue? I've read that Russian distinguishes the two at a fundamental level. (Which may be untrue, of course. I never believe everything I read.)

And is there any history behind this? The Western use of pink, the pink triangle in particular, is a parody on the Nazi badge applied to incarcerated homosexuals, but surely there's earlier pink history behind that. Anything similar in Russia?

I'll have the blue codpiece over there, please.

[Anonymous Coward]

Possible gay sheep fixation

Lester, is there something you're keeping from us?, maybe it's time to come out, let's be honest now this is not a first time for you is it, you are by means a virgin on the gay sheep front now, are you

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/02/sheep_research/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/03/08/inside_the_mind/

[Alan Ferris]

It had to be said...

Shame on Ewe!

I'll get my coat

[Charles Manning]

Nursery rhyme

Little Boy Blue come blow your horn,

The sheep's in the meadow the cow's in the corn.

But where's the boy who looks after the sheep?

He's under a haystack fast asleep.

Will you wake him? No, not I - for if I do, he's sure to cry

There's enough innuendo in that to make a dozen Carry On Shepherd movies.

[James]

Blue sheep

That is ridiculous, those sheep have been sheep dipped or photoshopped. No way from shagging or fighting that they could be that even in blue.

When marking sheep with blue dye all you do is smudge it on its belly a bit with a stick (http://www.livestockmarkers.com/) or spray it a slightly.

I think he did a Madonna: http://blogs.orange.co.uk/celebrity/2007/11/madonna-in-shee.html

By the way, don't be fooled, rams are always being gay, as with many other livestock. Many lambs even try it on with their mums.

[Anonymous Coward]

@ Alan Fisher

"I think domesticated animals, under what are considered unnatural conditions, tend to behave quite differently to their wild cousins"

Oh dear - a desperate attempt to rig the "nature vs nurture" debate?

Perhaps I should quote for you the colophon from the O'Reilly Perl Cookbook:

"Bighorn sheep are wild sheep ... Mature males usually stay apart from the females and young. In these "bachelor flocks" the lower-ranking males often play the part of ewes and behave in a submissive manner toward the dominant males. The dominant male, in turn, behaves like a courting ram and mounts the lower-ranking male. This behavior is believed to enable the rams to live together without rank disputes that might otherwise drive the lower-ranking males out of the flock."

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok you gay writer, you really will turn a funny article into a gay one, in your dreams!

The farmer is the authority on why the males are all blue, not you...

[Daniel]

perfectly normal

you have your mates around for a few buckets of rainwater and a nice plate of grass on a Friday night, you start watching some pron, next thing you know you're all naked and horny and jerking each other off.

Doesn't mean you're *gay* at all ....

[Fluffykins]

Has the speed of Sheep in a vacuum

Increased to the point where it is visibly blue-shifted?