Fine Dining — Sheep-style.

Give people a choice between a slice of bread and a slice of pizza and most will go for the pizza. Except for the food choices, it’s exactly the same with sheep. Power grid rights-of-way have many different kinds of vegetation, but Rambouillet’s would much rather munch the greenery of choice maple, cherry, oak, birch and pine trees--precisely the same trees that can grow tall enough to hit power lines.

And sheep don’t limit their diet to low-lying seedlings. By bending saplings to the ground, or standing on their hind legs, they can remove every leaf on a tree to a height of five feet.

If the sheep were forced to remain in the same location they would switch to less favorite forms of vegetation, but the shepherd and dogs keep the sheep moving along the right-of-way while making sure that they eat vegetation that is of greatest potential harm to the power lines.

While the sheep are grazing, they’re kept inside a portable pen that’s about three acres in size. While the sheep are eating, a second pen is set up in front of the first pen. When the tree vegetation is gone in pen one, the shepherd removes the fence between the two pens and the Border Collies push the sheep into pen two and it is closed off behind them. Pen one is then removed and placed in front of pen two and the process repeats itself in a giant game of grazing leap frog.