Bakker calls less than 10,000 sheep on Texel ‘very worrying’. He cannot yet imagine that there are no more lambs on the island. “With great difficulty we keep the garden wall landscape in our legs. We do our stinking best to give the sheep fines that are still there a future.”
“We focus enormously on quality improvement of the swirls in the sheep landscape. But if there are no more sheep in between, it is a museum without paintings. Then it will be a kind of Zaanse Schans.”
Adopt
Many people have a warm heart for the sheep farming. “They also regularly ask what they can do extra for us,” says Bakker. “You can think about that.”
One of the possibilities mentioned at the Association of Schapenboeren is to adopt a sheep. But there too, hooks and eyes. “If you make it too hugger, it will be complicated,” says Bakker.
“The guest will then determine which animal you are holding in the herd. That is actually not the intention. A lamb that is difficult to see is then adopted. And that is just the lamb that you do not want to keep. But we can think of something.”