The old Monfort lamb packing plant in San Angelo sold for a second time last year. Moslem investors bought the operation to process goats, a meat they hold in high esteem. Quite a stir prevailed in the lamb packing circles around town over the deal, fearing not only product competition, but more strain on an already tight job market.

At first, the city council considered giving the new owners a pretty good chunk of dough for creating jobs in an economy showing less than a four percent unemployment rate. Something like $100,000 in the next five years, or maybe it was $5000 over the next 100 years. Such huge sums of money don't rebate to a bitterweed sheep operation bent on balancing the winter death loss against the diminished lamb and wool crop, to be subtracted from the deficit feed bill and the overdue interest charges.

Last summer, I delivered a couple of loads of lambs to the buyer leasing the holding pens and scales on the old plant site. The whole corral system is under a tin roof. Took about five times longer to unload from the sunlight into the dark pens.

I hired the best trucker in the business to haul the lambs. On top of that, two of his friends, both good hands, happened by in time to help. But without a blindfold tied on each lamb to shade the descent from the open truck into near pitch darkness, the smartest Basque herder to ever drive a flock off the slope of the Pyrenees, backed by a good wife and his best dogs, couldn't have unloaded the first cut in less than an hour.

Everything worked against us. The lambs had the spook knocked out of them from being choused through a cutting chute and hauled 65 miles on a dusty, rocking truck bed. (Note to hollow horn operators: Where the hot-blooded humpy cow brute, for example, becomes wilder from being penned, woolies become lifeless if mishandled or overworked.) The humidity was high. Probably the most traumatic change was being pulled off the prickly pear cactus fruit they were consuming in record-breaking quantities.

Yes, I am sure now prickly pear withdrawal was the main trouble. Those lambs had been eating prickly pear apples for two months straight. Their old mothers had led them from one patch of cactus to the next. They weren't fresh weaned from their mothers; they were fresh weaned from prickly pear!

I don't know why I didn't think of the effect of the fierce addiction on lambs. At the time, we didn't have six head of ewes able to close their mouths to swallow from having lips full of thorns. All we would had to have done to unload those lambs was to back up to an old railroad loading chute grown up in prickly pear and whip mesquites.

So few sheepmen are left (and I fear this is going to be a problem for the new plant owners to understand), but we know sheep and goats face death better than they face life. An old ewe or an old nanny is never more content than when it has its head jabbed in big prickly pear so thorny a cactus wren has to look for a landing spot.

If anyone should have thought of the shock those lambs felt seeing bare ground without a sprig of prickly pear around, I should have. Must have been 1940 before the Mertzon school district bothered to grub the prickly pear from around the main building. Schoolteachers from out of country complained, or the board might not have ever noticed the thick stand of pear.

Once the lambs were unloaded, the next shock was going in the scale room and old receiving office. Stacks of dusty papers lay on top of the filing cabinets. The buyer said the file drawers were indexed and full. Hard white hats packinghouse employees wear hung on racks on top of soiled white aprons. The pencil sharpener overflowed with shavings, a matter my old fifth grade teacher would have never permitted.

Looked like the Monfort people had stepped out for the day instead of being gone for over two years. The silence and emptiness was eerie, however, the prevailing feeling of doom over the sheep business might have been a contributing factor.

The lambs weighed better than we thought from putting such a shrink on standing on the truck so long. One thing I do have straight about the new owners is they are going to have butchers ordained into the Islamic religion to kill goats to meet their faith's dieting laws. Unless a windstorm tears off the tin roof over the loading chute, the killing floor isn't going to be the only place needing a special blessing. Be good press for Allah's mercy if He lifted the roof off that torture chamber.

February 3, 2000