So, a sheep walks into the Happy Wombat and politely asks for a date ...
They're one of his favourite snacks, and his sheep-dad, Jamie, carries them in a little zip-lock baggie for when they go on walks.
Louie the sheep (well, wether, but let's not split wool) is nine years old and he's a city sheep.
He has lived in Newcastle since he was a wee lamb, only two days old and the smallest orphan from a property at Moree where Jamie Oorschot adopted him and brought him home to live with him and his partner Rachel King.
The couple met more than a decade ago after they bumped into each other at a pub on Beaumont Street. Jamie, an engineer, had moved east from Perth for the hang gliding and Rachel grew up in Auckland and moved onto the mainland when she was a teenager. She works as a voice-over artist, and the pair now live at Islington.
"He told me he had gone to buy a lawn mower and came back with a sheep," a friend joked at the Wombat, on Thursday morning, where Jamie, Rachel and Louie had come out for a coffee.
(Louie, incidentally, is a purist. He likes his coffee black. No water, no milk ... no grind. Just a little handful of beans as a treat every now and then, thank you very much.)
Louie has a streak of blue scattered through a forlock of dense, springy wool - a remnant of a cover-up dye job to hide some of the red that made part of his Halloween costume. Louie likes to take walks past flower gardens each day where his favourite flavour is "stolen". He likes to watch TV, trim the dandelions, and he weighs close to 140 kilograms. Louie is Louie.
"He's not like having a dog or a cat," Rachel explains as Louie nibbles a date from my hand and entertains the passersby. Louie, for one thing, has a remarkably vivid memory for place.
Some time ago, Rachel recalls, they were walking past a small laneway where an unawares cyclist passed and gave Louie a small fright. Now, whenever they pass the same laneway, he hesitates.
"I used to walk him on Kooragang Island," Rachel says at one point, "Now, when we drive passed the lane, he bahhs at me."
Louie is affectionate and chill, funny at times (Rachel remembers, when he was a lamb, watching him try to navigate the cat door at their home - both front legs first and then a lot of shimmying); he's friendly and gentle and for the most part, is happy to wander about his city and meet the locals.
A Facebook page, dedicated to his adventures around town, has countless photos of him visiting the beaches and parks, dressing up for Halloween, and at one time, riding the bus.
Bumping into a local sheep in a city the size of Newcastle might seem like a novel experience, but it's not as entirely quirky as it might first appear.
Back in 2016, a "Fire Flocks" project was conceived as a regional strategy to combat wildfires in the north-east Iberian peninsula of Spain. It involved herds of sheep or other livestock helping to thin vegetation and manage fire risk. California similarly caught on to the idea and has been enlisting goats as firefighters across the state, according recent reporting by the Washington Post.
Suburbia - the report notes - is the next frontier.
Sheep, for example, are experts at lawn care. Unlike goats and horses, they tend to be a little more picky about how and what they forage, taking only the sweeter ends of the blade and leaving about four inches which, incidentally, is the perfect height to maintain steady and healthy growth, maximising root health, while also shading out undesirable weeds.
Mechanical lawn-mowing tends to cut lower, which encourages faster growth as the blades compete for sunlight, leading to more mowing.
Sheep are also great for the environment. Carbon from the lawn is returned to the soil in the sheep's pellets and one study in 2006, noted in the same Post report of October 23, found replacing sheep for lawn mowers cut net emissions by more than a third.
It's not beyond the pale to consider managed grazing, and the benefits of silvopastoralism, as a viable alternative as our collective conscious turns increasingly to more sustainable and affordable forms of living. Food (as Louie might suggest) for thought.
