I Wanted to Be the Sheepdog

On a killer sheep, and why being in the flock is not what I thought.

October 20, 2026
by Richard Yung Chung

So… a few years ago in New Zealand, an elderly couple were killed by their own sheep.

I want to give you a moment with that, because I needed one myself.

Not by a wild animal. Not by a bear or a dog or anything with a reputation. By a sheep. The animal we have collectively agreed is the least threatening creature on earth; the one we put on nursery wallpaper, the one children are told to count in order to fall asleep. Yet it killed two people who had presumably been feeding it for years.

I looked into it afterward. It turns out the animal was a ram. A male. And rams during mating season can become genuinely aggressive, agitated, territorial and dangerous. It remains highly unusual for one to turn on its own owners. There was an investigation. I said at the time I would report back when the findings came out, and I should tell you honestly: don’t hold your breath.

But I have thought about that ram a great deal, and here is why.

I am in the business of telling people they are sheep.

It is one of the oldest images in the tradition and one of the warmest. I am the good shepherd. I know my own sheep, and they know my voice. Psalm 23. Lost sheep, found sheep, ninety-nine left on the hillside to go after one. The image runs right through.

And I have preached it for over thirty years, and I have never once met anybody who was pleased to be identified as a sheep.

Because we know what sheep are. Sheep follow. Sheep are not bright. Sheep move as a mass and go where the mass goes, and if the mass goes off a cliff, so does every individual sheep with no further questions. To call somebody a sheep in ordinary English is to insult them, and everyone in the pew has the sense, politely unspoken, that the metaphor has not aged well.

I will confess something. I spent an entire sermon once explaining, at some length, that if I had to be somewhere in this picture, I would prefer to be the sheepdog.

The sheepdog is magnificent. The sheepdog is intelligent and quick and useful. The sheepdog understands the plan. The sheepdog works alongside the shepherd rather than being herded by him – a junior colleague rather than livestock. I made this case with real feeling, and the congregation enjoyed it, and I went home pleased with myself.

It took me a while to notice what I had actually said, which is: I would like to be management.

I would like to be the one helping, not the one being carried. I would like to be useful to God rather than dependent on him. Give me a role. Give me something to do. Anything but standing in a field being counted.

That is not humility. That is the oldest ambition there is, wearing a collar.

Here is what changed my mind. I did a little research.

I got curious about whether ancient shepherds really named their sheep. Whether the line about calling them by name was a figure of speech or an actual practice.

It was an actual practice. They named them. Every one.

And not sentimentally. It was operational. A shepherd with a flock of forty needed to know which one wandered, which one lagged, which one got sick in the wet, which one would push to the front at water and which would hang back and go thirsty if you didn’t watch for it. The name was how you stored all that. The name was a file on an individual animal’s temperament and history and particular weaknesses.

So the name was not a label at all. The name meant: I have been watching you specifically, for years, and I know exactly what you are like.

Which changes the whole picture.

I had been reading the flock as a crowd. Tthe place where you lose your outline and become one of many, indistinguishable, herded. That is what I was trying to escape by promoting myself to sheepdog.

But that is not what the shepherd sees. The shepherd sees forty individuals, each one known in tedious and unflattering detail, called by a name that encodes their particular habit of going wrong.

Being in the flock is not anonymity. It is the opposite. It is being known too well to hide.

Which, now that I say it plainly, may be what I was actually running from.

I still think about that ram in New Zealand, and I have decided the story is not the exception I first took it for.

Because the shepherd image has a comfortable version and an honest one. The comfortable version has fluffy, docile, harmless creatures standing about in soft light. The honest version includes the fact that the animals are not gentle by nature. They are strong. They are unpredictable in the wrong season. Under certain conditions they will put their heads down and come at the very people who have fed them every day for years.

Anyone who has actually done pastoral work for thirty years will recognise this immediately, and will not require it explained.

The shepherd in the story knows all of that and stays anyway. That is not a man romanticising his flock. That is a man who knows exactly what he is dealing with, knows which ones are dangerous and in which season, knows every name and everything each name stands for and comes out to the field in the morning regardless.

I no longer want to be the sheepdog.

I have met the sheep. I am one. I know what we’re like.

And the remarkable part of the story was never that we’re worth herding.

It’s that someone learned all forty names.

Richard