The Real Sheep

The World

There’s an expression among Navajo people in the Four Corners area of the southwest ?”sheep is life.” The sheep the Navajo first raised were called churro. They were brought over by Spanish conquistadors in the late 1500s, the first domestic sheep in North America. By the 1930s they were nearly wiped out by the federal government’s campaign against overgrazing on the Navajo reservation. But now, they’ve made a comeback. From Arizona Public Radio, Daniel Kraker tells the remarkable survival story of the Navajo-churro sheep.

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