CONNEMARA, Ireland: a group of American tourists returning from a pub in Leenane late Thursday pulled their rental car over on a mountain road and spray-painted roughly forty sheep red and blue, in what they later described to Gardaí as a gesture of friendship between nations. They noted that they had not needed any white.
The sheep were already red and blue. Farmers in the area have marked their flocks with colored dye for generations, each family using its own combination of colors and placement to show which animals are theirs.
The tourists, from Ohio, did not know this. By the time they finished, neither did the farmers. The group painted generously and with no regard for existing marks, and three neighboring families spent Friday morning standing on the road trying to work out whose sheep were whose. At least one ewe is now, by the standards of the parish, owned by all three, and a blackface ewe with a fresh blue stripe across her back appears to be registered to a farmer who died in 2011.
A red mark on a ewe’s shoulder also carries a specific agricultural meaning, which one farmer explained to the group in some detail. They were reportedly quiet for most of the drive back to their hotel.
Gardaí declined to press charges, saying a red-and-blue sheep in Connemara is not, on its own, evidence of anything.
“Forty years I’ve been marking sheep,” said one of the farmers, “and it never once occurred to me to make a flag of them. I’ll give them that much.”
FTN BULLETIN: This report is fiction.