He was born in August 1996 on an organic farm in Massachusetts. The farm owners had envisioned raising a herd of milk sheep. When that idea foundered, the sheep went neglected.
Herbal’s mother, an elderly ewe, gave birth to twins late that summer, but she couldn’t nurse them properly. Emily Newman, a New Yorker who’d finished her first year of veterinary school at Colorado State University, had spent that summer working at the farm. She immediately saw that the lambs were doing poorly, but was told the farm manager would take care of it.
“…I had two choices: leave him there to die or take him, because the people supposedly taking care of him weren’t doing it adequately,’’ she recalls. She took the lamb and drove to Boston, where she stayed with a friend.
Five weeks later, Newman packed her things and her lamb into her car and drove to Colorado to attend school.
At [a] festival, she stopped by a booth for Wilderness Ranch, the six-year-old facility 15 miles outside Fort Collins. It seemed like the perfect place. The ranch agreed to take Herbal.
That was September, and Herbal, while still weak, seemed healthy. But he soon fell ill. Within days, he couldn’t walk. Doctors at the veterinary school suspected Herbal’s bad start in life had affected his immune system. He developed an infection that settled in his spine, leaving him paralyzed.
In the ranch’s Christmas cards, Hamilton asked supporters to pray for the lamb or send him energy. People came in daily to do acupuncture or therapeutic touch on Herbal. And the lamb seemed to respond. The seizures stopped. He appeared to be getting stronger.
On Christmas morning 1996 Herbal stood up unassisted for the first time in two months and took five wobbly steps. By New Year’s Day, he was walking.
“Now he runs with the dogs and keeps up with them just fine. He’s leaping. He’s actually a pest sometimes. He’s just doing beautifully,” Hamilton says.
What cured Herbal? Hamilton says. “It’s a lot easier to give up if you’re alone and have no support. But he knew someone was always there, and he survived.”
Whenever somebody, lamb or human, heals on their own, it’s credited to prayer or some ridiculous treatment like acupuncture ot TT. I can just imagine the scene. A bunch of hippies huddled around a sick lamb waiting to use their special magic healing powers on it.
Let’s also not forget that this is a food animal and would normally only live to be slaughtered and eaten. I’m fine with this. If that had been an ordinary farm instead of a woo-woo organic one, the farmer most likely would have put it out of its misery rather than let it suffer while hippies doted over it. IT’S A GODDAMN SHEEP!
It’s a Festivus miracle!
Clayton — I not only agree, it’s sort of the point we’re making this weekend.