SHEEP RUSTLING IN THE FAMILY? This article in the Economist (December 7) reports on the increase in sheep rustling in Britain. The rustlers rarely have a lot of land to graze sheep, so the lambs are usually taken and slaughtered quickly. A caption in the Economist article calls the phenomenon “The Revival of an Old Crime”.
The article caught my attention for personal reasons. Our family can’t trace the Schaefer branch very far back. The name Schaefer means “shepherd” in German. A family joke is that we can only speculate that at some point in the past one of our ancestors was hanged for sheep rustling.