When I was five years old and utterly trusting, my parents presented me with a pet lamb. I loved it to distraction, ignoring the fact that it did little but stare blankly into the distance and deposit little round pellets with the regularity of Trump tweets.
We lived in a cottage with no electricity on a sprawling estate near Nelspruit, a wonderful place where venomous snakes flourished, the locals brewed a potent version of umqombothi, and parents lied to their children about the mysterious disappearance of sweet little lambs that grew up to become damn nuisances.
I’d like to think that my woolly friend wandered off to join a freedom-loving sheep commune, but more likely I ate him with mint sauce, carrots and roast potatoes. So it goes.
MEET MY FRIEND Felicity Collen. Hands-on owner of a home renovation company in Cape Town, she’s an interesting amalgam of urban savvy and rural common sense. Felicity grew up in Kimberley, Northern Cape, with a family who believed in doing things for themselves. Her father taught her mechanical skills – at the age of five, she knew which spanners to hand him when he worked on his vehicles – and later, when the Collens acquired a farm near Douglas, she was instructed in the fine art of ethical slaughter.
This is not as contradictory as it may sound. When I interviewed her for an article two years ago, Felicity explained the principle: “If I’m visiting the farm and an animal has been shot, I’m part of the process. I will use every [expletive] part of that animal. For me,
