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The Docile Sheep
by Haocong Cheng
Cite As: Cheng, Haocong. 2025. “The Docile Sheep.” EAS 590: Critical Animal Studies, May 1. https://asianpacific.duke.edu/blog-post/docile-sheep.
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Childhood Encounter with a Docile Sheep
photo credit: Haocong Cheng
“The sheep are indeed docile,” I told myself after I saw a man slaughter sheep as a child in Sunid Right Banner, a county-level pastoral region near the China-Mongolia border. He knelt on an upward-facing sheep and slit a small cut on its neck. He then stuck his hand inside the cut and quickly pulled out a piece of flesh—I later learned that the sheep’s main artery was severed at that moment. The sheep quivered a while, yet the man continued his work, dissembling the freshly killed corpse into large pieces. After a while, the once alive sheep was reduced to several water basins of bone-in mutton, sheep organs, and an entire piece of sheep hide. Among them was the dead sheep’s head—the only piece that reminded the specters of the sheep’s freshness.
Witnessing the gruesome event, I was left aghast by the bloody hand, the frightened sheep, and the fast pace of the entire process. To my parents’ surprise, I refused to eat the boiled mutton—which was freshly prepared and served for us afterwards, as a gesture of pastoral hospitality in Inner Mongolia. The traumatic incident did not change my diet preference, yet it did instill in me a lasting belief that sheep are a docile species—one that doesn’t fight back even when being slaughtered unlike, for example, pigs, which my senior family members often described kicking and biting in resistance.
This perception of sheep’s docility mirrors a broader domestication trope that is grounded in assumptions of human mastery and animal passivity: what anthropologist Anna Tsing critiques as a flattening narrative that undermines “the ability to see the historical force of forms of interspecies dependence” (Tsing 2018, 232). Looking back, I realize that I had internalized this narrative. In my research, however, I have come to see that the supposedly docile sheep have played a historically powerful role in shaping their relationship with humans. Instead of framing this relationship purely as domestication, one might consider its historicity as a process of “habituation” that, according to Kath Weston, is a form of interspecies reciprocity that “unfolds in processual time over the course of days, weeks, even years” (Weston 2022, 56).
Taking a cue from this idea, this essay explores human-sheep relationship in China from the 1940s to the 1980s by looking at a state-led sheep breeding project. Based on my ongoing research, I argue that the intra-species variations of sheep’s physical characteristics posed challenges to Chinese scientists’ efforts to use artificial insemination to engineer a new fine-wool sheep breed. Far from becoming a standardized breed that requires less care, the crossbred fine-wool sheep demanded more labor and attention, compelling herders to mobilize more people and adapting existing herding practices. I suggest that the interaction between different sheep breeds and Mongol herders points to an alternative form of animal husbandry—one that departs from the logics of industrial livestock farming.
The Recalcitrant Physiology of Sheep
After the Second World War, the United Nations provided foreign sheep breeds to China as relief animals, but the harsh environment of Northern China resulted in high mortality rates. In response, Chinese scientists sought to develop a hybrid type of increased adaptability by crossbreeding local Mongol sheep with foreign ones. New breeds began to appear by actively employing modern scientific technology such as artificial insemination and hormone injection. Yet, such crossbred sheep, in turn, required extensive care from humans in their new habitats—for their needs for stable shelters, nutritious fodder, and medicines so that the hybrid sheep can survive and produce ever finer wool for China’s growing textile industry.
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During my visit in 2024 to a dilapidated breeding station in a former state-owned pasture, I noticed a pile of dust-covered statistical sheets that were produced during China’s socialist period (1949-1978). One insemination record from 1956 documented three types of ewes represented by five-digit serial numbers. In the columns titled “estrus cycle (faqing qi),” some ewes had multiple dates listed, others had the same date under two to three different columns, and a few had only one date in a single column.
The veterinarian who accompanied me explained that the dates represented the times each ewe was inseminated during the corresponding estrus cycle. Technicians, she told me, would later check each ewe to see if the insemination had resulted in pregnancy.
Browsing through the sheet, I noticed an ewe (“#5-0170”) had two inseminating dates under each of the three columns, which meant that this particular ewe went through six insemination attempts before becoming pregnant. This kind of delay likely posed serious troubles to the broader breeding project, which depended on all the ewes giving birth around the same time in spring, so herders could focus on taking care of both the lambs and ewes, making it easier to manage labor.
It is impossible to reconstruct this individual ewe’s life story just with a serial number; she might have been eliminated as “unfit” from the breeding herd, succumbed to disease, or continued an erratic life due to the scarcity of crossbred-breeding sheep. In any case, I argue that her presence is a reminder that, even with artificial insemination, a cutting-edge technology of the 1950s, humans never gained full control over sheep’s lives.
The recalcitrant sheep body reminds me of Alex Blanchette’s monograph on industrial pig farming in the U.S., where he rightly notes that there was a paradox at the heart of the industrialized, factory-farmed pigs. Although the pig’s relatively fixed basic biological form allows “extremely precise divisions of human labor around the carcass,” the subtle variations within the not fully standardized pig bodies made it impossible to replace human workers with machines (Blanchette 2020, 190). The paradox—which led to more, rather than less, reliance on human workers in the production process—highlights the extent to which the ideal of standardizing pigs through machines falls short in practice.
Likewise, the ideal to standardize ewes—by making them enter the estrus cycle simultaneously, get pregnant with artificial insemination, and give birth to ever-finer wool sheep breeds—was never fully realized. A similar paradox emerged in the creation of hybrid sheep with finer wool.
Ewes generally have a pregnancy of around 150 days, and the locally varied mating period in Inner Mongolia is generally from July to August or from November to December. They need to be brought into the estrus cycle and impregnated within a specific month-long period so that herders need not grapple with a herd in which each ewes requires individualized care due to being at a different stage in the reproductive cycle. Yet, within this limited timeframe, individual sheep exhibit varying patterns of sexual responsiveness and physiological ovulation, which cannot be fully controlled.
There were also individual ewes, I found, that either failed to enter their estrus cycle within the designated timeframe or manifested symptoms of pregnancy but did not actually carry a fetus—what is commonly called as “false pregnancy” (also known as pseudopregnancy or hydrometra). These examples, I argue, are emblematic of the broader paradox: despite efforts to standardize reproduction, the biological variability of sheep continued to resist full control.
The Sheep Influencing Human Society
The sheep-human relationship in China has another historical implication that is particular to the Maoist era. About the legacy of this period, some scholars are quick to make connections between countless examples of environmental disasters caused by Maoist policies and the trope of “human’s will over nature” (rendingshengtian), critiquing the regime’s contribution to current environmental crises. While not denying the environmental cost of the Mao era, I contend that such presumption of human agency over abstract nature risks dismissing the role of nonhuman animals in constituting the historical condition of interspecies habituation, as my research in Inner Mongolia demonstrates.
In response to the increasing caring demands of the hybrid fine-wool sheep, the Maoist state mobilized more people to be involved, besides from making herders and veterinarians work harder. Women were particularly encouraged to perform feminine care and artificial insemination as a way of demonstrating their capacity to combat gender stereotypes that deemed the insemination work to be improper for women. This shows how the crossbreeding project gradually reconfigured human society both physically and symbolically. In fact, the new sheep breed required so much more human labor that, after the privatization of pasture rights and livestock in Inner Mongolia in 1984, many Mongol herders switched to older local sheep breeds that required significantly less work.
The Mongol herders also engaged in practices of consuming sheep in ways that are not exactly dominated by the capitalist goals of maximizing profits through large-scale wool production. Livestock are more than material resources—they play crucial roles in the Mongol pastoral culture. As anthropologists have shown, in the Mongolian cultural region, livestock such as camel are central to the Mongol ideal of “multispecies pastoralism” manifested by herders having “five kinds” of livestock: camels, horses, sheep, goats, and cattle (White and Fijn 2020). Such way of relating with livestock may inspire new approaches to dealing with the “leftovers” of animal husbandry production. Mongol herders, for example, often consumed sheep organs and blood rather than discarding or commodifying them. While it may be too bold to suggest that the Mongol way of relating to sheep is the ideal model, it nonetheless offers a powerful example of how herding practices, ethnically Mongolian or not, can foster new forms of connection among people, as anthropologist Thomas White shows in his ethnography how “the sociality of camel husbandry” among camel herders in west Inner Mongolia transcended ethnic boundaries and brought herders from different backgrounds into meaningful relations (White 2024, 77-98).
The Docile Sheep, Reconsidered
My ongoing research on sheep breeding in Inner Mongolia during the Maoist regime complicates the docility of sheep on multiple fronts by showing how they often acted upon and redirected human practices of breeding, rather than unconditionally manipulated by humans at will. The “problems” of the docile sheep may be interpreted as the exemplar of the “world-making” power of sheep (Anna Tsing 2015, 292). In Maoist Inner Mongolia, the docile sheep’s recalcitrance urged herders to re-train themselves into amateur technicians, who took up not only insemination but also coming up with nutritious fodder and paying extra attention to carry the pregnant sheep through its term. It also shows that sheep have not only historically conditioned how humans relate to them and understand our society, but also have the potential to reshape interpersonal relationships among herders. Encountered through these interspecies histories, the “docile” sheep, far from being led, may have been quietly leading all along.
About the author
Haocong Cheng is a PhD student in the Department of History at Duke University. His research investigates the scientific improvement of livestock in 20th-century China, with a focus on Inner Mongolia. He examines how scientists understood livestock breeding as a process of transnational knowledge production and how they employed technologies such as artificial insemination to modernize China’s animal husbandry.
References
Blanchette, Alex. 2020. Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2018. “Nine Provocations for the Study of Domestication.” In Domestication Gone Wild: Politics and Practices of Multispecies Relations, edited by Heather Anne Swanson, Marianne Elisabeth Lien, and Gro B. Ween, 231–251. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Weston, Kath. 2022. “The Habit in Cohabitation (Or, How to Meet a Tiger on the Path).” Humanimalia 13(1): 45–78.
White, Thomas. 2024. China’s Camel Country: Livestock and Nation-Building at a Pastoral Frontier. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.
White, Thomas, and Natasha Fijn. 2020. “Special Section: Multispecies Co-Existence in Inner Asia: Introduction: Resituating Domestication in Inner Asia.” Inner Asia 22(2): 162–82.