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Comment by rwnspace | Hacker News Reader

And yet here I was, going to the comments first (as is tradition), wondering whether Herdwicks is an individual sheep with the power to terraform, or a breed of some mild historical significance.

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Well, I guess 'terraforming' is an overstatement, but hill farming in general and the sheep specifically have had a profound effect on the landscape. This link is to a polemic, but it also contains plenty of references. https://www.monbiot.com/2013/05/30/sheepwrecked/

Considering how much damage sheep do to the landscape and how unprofitable sheep farming, I think we'd be off paying sheep farmers to re-wild the hills

Yep I've been thinking about adding some little babydoll southdown sheep here to my hobby farm -- mostly because they're cute but also so I don't have to mow as much and to help weed the vineyard and make some manure for the garden and to give my border collie something to do -- and what I've noticed is that almost everyone keeping sheep around here is doing it for the same kinds of reasons. They're cute. Keeping sheep gives that pastoral feel. (As my teen daughter would say ... It's cottage-core). It's something their family did. Etc. Almost nobody is doing it because it's profitable.

At least around here (southern Ontario) it wouldn't be an environmentally problematic thing, but there are definitely places in the world where the land _and_ economics would be much better off without ruminants and returned to a natural state.

I've heard of goats used for "terraforming". Several U.S. states have used them to remove invasive plant species (by eating them, because goat).

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