Do you know off the top of your head which wild animal our domestic sheep came from? Sheep are the domesticated form of the mouflon. Their domestication probably took place 10,000 years ago, and humans have been using sheep’s meat and sheep’s wool for over 5,000 years.
In captivity, mouflon live to be around 16 years old, in the wild – where there are all kinds of dangers – around eight to 12 years. The natural life expectancy of a domestic sheep is – if it is not slaughtered – ten to 20 years. The oldest sheep in the world was called Lucky and lived in Australia. The oldest sheep in the world is said to have lived in Wales and lived to be 28 years old.
Today, many of the sheep that provide us with mutton, roast lamb or wool products live in intensive livestock farming. Very few of them reach their natural life span in this form of husbandry. In intensive husbandry, a wool sheep becomes about seven years old – and thus it still has the longest life expectancy among its conspecifics.
fattening lambs have with three to four months a particularly short life before they end up on the plate as roast lamb. A milk sheep, breeding sheep or wool sheep lives longer in comparison. However, its life expectancy in intensive livestock farming is still there more than ten years under the possible lifespan of the animals.