Les agneaux sont très fragiles à la naissance et meurent souvent prématurément. Illustration Unsplash. – Bill Fairs.
Cévennes agropastoralism combines sheep farming and shepherding traditions, a model that makes Occitanie the leading French region in the sector. But some little-known practices are causing some to grind their teeth. This is the case of the “pyjama technique”, which consists of dressing an orphan lamb with the skin of a dead person, in order to have it recognized by the ewe who has lost her baby.
Sometimes, lambs are stillborn, or die a few hours after birth. So, “we can recover the skin of this lamb to cover the orphan lamb with it, the ewe will recognize the smell of its lamb: it is the pyjama technique”, explains the Livestock Institute on its website. An ancestral practice that is little known, and very recently denounced by the association fighting against animal suffering L214 on its social networks.
Dressing another lamb with the skin of a dead lamb to lure a ewe ? A method that is as useful to breeders as it is controversial. While it allows orphaned lambs to be fed, it is a practice that seems barbaric.
“Saving a lamb with a dead lamb”
Such a method allows orphaned lambs to find a mother, and mothers who have lost their young to find one. An interpretation that allows us to see in what is called “empellage” or “pelissage” a certain ethic. We contacted Paul, a former employee of lamb meat farms in Crau (Tarascon) and in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence.
He explains to us that pellissage is also practiced when some ewes are unable to take care of their young, in order to have them adopted by another mother. Ewes who have lost their lamb therefore take in the young of others. Paul emphasizes a balanced practice: “We grouped all the births”, so as to be able to carry out these rotations between ewes and lambs.
Concretely, the furring consists of “hanging the lamb, cutting the skin at the level of the legs and skinning it by pulling on it and working the fur with a knife”. Then, the lamb to be adopted is covered with the recovered skin , “it really is like pajamas”. “Afterwards, we put him in a small one-square-metre box with the ewe. She uses her sense of smell a lot, so she will confuse the new lamb with her young”.
200% Deposit Bonus up to €3,000 180% First Deposit Bonus up to $20,000After a few lambing seasons and about ten coats, Paul stopped working on farms. He is now vegan and helps out at the Groingroin refuge, designed to accommodate animals “so-called farm animals”.
Luring in livestock farming
To a lesser extent, several practices in sheep farming encourage ewes to adopt other young. For example, orphaned lambs can be rubbed with a placenta. Alternatively, farmers can blow into the uterus of the mother who has lost her baby, or massage her vagina by hand, in order to make her believe in a second birth. All that remains is to present her with another lamb's baby so that she confuses it with her own. In Aubrac, it happens that a dead calf's tail is tied to that of a living calf in order to help the cow release its milk.
Techniques also observed for the adoption of lambs in Morocco, calves in Mauritania, or even camels in Niger, explains Anne-Marie Brisebarre.
Accusations of barbarism
For the spokesperson and founder of L214, Brigitte Gothière, stuffing is often practiced on lambs killed by the farmers themselves, and not on lambs that died naturally: “There is an accounting logic behind it. You are going to kill slightly fragile newborns to allow stronger lambs to benefit from their mother's milk. It is not just using the skin of orphans, it is also killing young ones.”
She invites consumers to reflect on these practices: “These are tricks. Sometimes farmers bring dogs into the pens to scare the ewes. This triggers a protective reflex towards young ones that are not the their.”
The know-how of the Cévennes shepherds
A tradition among the region’s shepherds, observed by anthropologist Anne-Marie Brisebarre in the 1970s. At the time, the researcher tells us, this discovery was part of research into Cévennes pastoralism. “I witnessed a practice that took place in the privacy of the sheepfold: a ewe having given birth to a live but malformed lamb, the farmer killed the newborn who, according to him, would not have lived”, she writes in her article Lure livestock: adoption and milking techniques, published in 2013.
An ancestral practice, acquired by farmers over generations through observation of lambing periods. It was not until 1954, points out Anne-Marie Brisebarre, that a link was made between these methods and the internal functioning of sheep. They would allow ewes to release oxytocin, the famous “attachment hormone”, facilitating “the initiation of maternal behavior at the time of birth”.
The Causses and the Cévennes, territories of Hérault, Lozère, Gard and Aveyron, have been part of UNESCO's world heritage as a “Mediterranean agro-pastoral cultural landscape” since 2011. This is due to sheep farming in the region's mountain ranges. A heritage cultivated for generations, including the occasional practice of stuffing lambs is unknown to the general public.
For three millennia, local agropastoralism has managed to resist against all odds, maintaining the notion of a shepherd loving his sheepfold, of transhumance, of herds and other patous… more than impersonal and unnatural super-farms.
Occitanie is the leading sheep farming region in France. Furthermore, the practice of stuffing is observed more in small farms than in large ones. In any case, it invites breeders and consumers to reflect on the issue.
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