I had a great evening at a dinnery partay tonight - in a locally produced cheese, home-cured olives, lemony-risotto, chocolate mouse and shed loads of alcohol sort of way - featuring a MOST interesting conversation about sheep's scrotum bags.
Apparently these things - sheep balls' bags - sell for $80 a pop on Ebay, and so they do (albeit reduced):
The guy that put me on to this has only got into sheep farming relatively recently, and he's been looking around for ways of making a bit of extra cash from his sheep (he has about 20-30) - and he's doing this - it's a lot of work: you have to...
- rear the sheep
- slaughter them
- extract the BALLS
- remove the testicles
- clean what's left
- process what's left into a bag.
NB the later might be quite a lot of effort in itself.
But is it worth it?
The idea behind sheep's ball bags is that you're making use of EVERY part of the sheep, which I respect and 'get' - but from a purely financial perspective this makes no sense at all.
I mean I can pick up a bum bag from Ebay for < $10 EU.
But maybe this is the price of genuine sustainability?
This guy rears sheep and uses EVERYTHING he can, he's not a cowboy, he's not a pimp, he's just an ordinary guy trying to make a living, and he thinks that $80 is a fair price for a sheep's scrotum bag.
For me it's a no...
While I appreciate the ethics and the effort I just think I can get better value out of other sustainable alternatives - ethical cotton bags or even wicker baskets, for example,
So I'll take the meat and the wool, but I'm not so sure the Scrotum sacks are worth it for me personally, but apparently there is market for this, so I wish the guy luck in selling to people who want these Sheep Scrotum Bags!