“We bought a new sheep feeder and I noticed when I walked past them in the field that a lot of them had pink heads,” Richard Nicholson, owner of Cannon Hall Farm in Barnsley, UK, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. “I didn’t put two and two together initially.” The feeder is bright red and Nicholson believes the paint rubbed off on his flock while they were feeding. “They have very attractive pink hair now, so we’re very happy with that,” she said. The sheep, he says, seem to be happy too. “I think they’re enjoying it. I’ve seen them jump around the field today,” Nicholson said. A herd of Valais blacknose sheep on a British farm, all with bright pink hair. (Submitted by Richard Nicholson) Nicholson has a flock of Valais blacknose sheep, a rare breed native to the Swiss Alps. Sometimes called “the cutest sheep in the world,” they are shaggy and white all over except for their black faces and matching spots on their legs. They were historically raised for both meat and wool, but Nicholson says he mostly sells them to people who want to keep them around as companions. “We breed them to try to bring the numbers back up and a lot of people buy them just because they look so attractive in the fields,” he said. “For a while, we sold a lot of llamas and alpacas as exotic pets, but now it seems to be Swiss Valais sheep that are going.” It’s no mystery why, he says. “They’re really fun animals to watch,” he said. “Sometimes, you’ll find them sticking your tongue out.” Farmer Richard Nicholson compared his pink-haired sheep to Debbie Harry from US rock band Blondie. (Lucas Jackson/Reuters, Submitted by Richard Nicholson) The pink hair probably isn’t permanent, but Nicholson joked that he might have to keep dyeing his feeder different colors to produce new coifs. But she says there’s something special about pink. “They [look] a bit like 1970s Blondie,” he said, referring to the American rock band’s lead singer, Debbie Harry. “She used to have a bit of a pink tint to her hair and it looks a lot like her.”
