Sheep Shopping

My family wanted three sheep for the holiday Tabaski, so we went to the sheep market on Monday night hoping to get some last minute deals. My host brother Moctar is a bachelor, so he said he didn’t need to have a big sheep, but my other host brother, Cheikh, is married, and it is expected that you bring home a healthy sheep to your wife for Tabaski, so there was some pressure on him. Leaving the house had a feeling similar to the we-are-going-to-get-a-christmas-tree feeling for Christmas. We walked to the sheep market which had thousands of animals. They were arranged into clumps of about 10, each one governed by a shepherd. Shopping with me was probably not the best idea, because they assume all white people have a lot of money, so when Moctar or Cheikh would ask for a price, the shepherd would say a price that was too high and say that since they were with a toobab, they could afford it. One shepherd told me I was the only white person he had ever seen shopping for a sheep. I did feel really out of place, and I started to hang behind my host brothers while they haggled for a price so the shepherds wouldn’t think I was with them. Just some random white guy…checkin’ out the sheep. I know nothing about sheep and had no intention of buying one, but after the two hours we spent looking around and getting prices, I started to be able to size up and guess about how much a sheep would cost. The average price for a sheep is about 80 dollars, but it all depends on size and health. I was bored for a while and amused myself by asking random shepherds how much money their biggest sheep costs. Then I would pretend to haggle for a while then walk away. There is also an inspection process where you walk around the sheep and slap it a little, get it to move. It’s kind of like kicking the tires on a car. I did feel kind of bad for the sheep just because they are treated like objects instead of animals. Sometimes you can tell they are clearly in pain, but the shepherds just keep whipping them. Also, after they are bought, they are incredibly intractable when taken away from the shepherd. I can add “sheep wrangling” to my list of “things I didn’t know I was bad at until I moved to Senegal”. They just don’t want to move and are surprisingly strong. Thankfully, once we got to the road we hailed a taxi. To transport the sheep back to the house, the legs are tied together and they are put in the trunk of a taxi. It is inhumane, no doubt, but considering it took me 20 minutes to drag the poor thing about a hundred yards, the trunk ride was probably less painful than me dragging it the remaining half mile home. Also, I can’t really cast blame, because I’m sure I transported my little brother in the same fashion at some point in my childhood. Now there are four sheep behind our house. Three are getting the knife tomorrow morning. Moctar says he will spend the day separating the meat from the organs. Ahhhh the holidays…