The first challenge - finding shepherds (juhasi)
Probably, the biggest challenge for pastoralists in Poland today is finding, hiring, and retaining shepherds or juhasi. As in many other European countries, there is an acute problem with the advancing age of shepherds and a failure to adequately reproduce a qualified workforce for pastoral enterprises (see Hadjigeorgiou 2011; Manzano Baena and Casas 2010). While good shepherds with years of experience still can be found, they are usually men of 65 years old or older. They belong to a generation who took advantage of the strong post-War pastoral economy. For this generation, pastoralism was a good way to make a living, with bacas and juhasi being both respected and relatively affluent during the Communist period. Illustrated by an old adage of ‘kto ma owce, ten ma co chce’ (‘he who owns sheep, can afford whatever he wants’), this past prosperity is reflected in their biographies. Baca Antek from Podhale, for example, told us how, as a young man in the 1980s, he worked as a juhas for three years. His earnings allowed him to buy a few hectares of land, build a house, and get married.
Under contemporary economic conditions, however, working as a juhas for three seasons does not provide anyone with a foundation for life. Being a shepherd is no longer as lucrative as it once was, nor is it perceived as a desirable occupation for a young man. One reason is the 24-h nature of the job. It is the job of the juhasi to tend to the grazing sheep during the day, to milk the sheep twice a day, and to help with the cheese production. Furthermore, at least one of them has to spend the night with the sheep wherever they stay up on the alpine pastures, in order to protect the flock against wolves, which enjoy a protected status in Poland. In such cases, juhasi sleep in portable shelters so that they are ready to intervene when the sheep show signs of anxiety or their dogs sound the alarm (Figure 3). They also have to move the temporary enclosure, or koszor, at least once every two days (and more frequently if it is raining). Indeed, a juhas must have certain character traits that allow him to withstand the solitary aspect of this occupation, infrequent visits home, all male company, and basic hygiene. In a word, juhasi must be tough. This is a quality which pastoralists deem lacking in young men today. As the son of a baca working in Małe Pieniny explained:
There are no young people. Where can one find young guys to do it? There are none, I am telling you. I think that all those bacówki (shepherds’ huts) are going to last maybe a few years more and then it is all going to die. [...] The young people don’t even feel like getting a proper job where you have to really work, let alone to work on a bacówka where you have to stay from Sunday until Sunday, where you have to graze the sheep while others are free. They want to go to work that ends on Friday at twelve and starts on Monday at twelve, and get paid five thousand zloty (laughs).
His observations were echoed by baca Jasiek, from Ochotnica who humorously, yet bitterly, remarked:
Everybody has this “weekend” now. In the old days, people didn’t even know what a “weekend” was. Nobody wants this kind of work, with sheep, where one is tied down with them all the time, when the ewes give birth in the winter, when the spring comes and I realise I didn’t even have time to shave.
In short, other opportunities for year-round employment, or at least employment offering those ‘weekends’ maligned by baca Jasiek, mean that young men in the region consistently turn down offers of work from head shepherds. Those young men who do not find alternative employment locally often opt to leave Poland completely, and seek better paid work in the UK. As a result, today’s juhasi are often recruited from a pool of local men who would otherwise be considered unemployable due to chronic health issues or alcohol problems. This situation is well illustrated by the response of baca Adam, working in the Babia Góra region, when asked how he found help on a short notice. He told us that he went looking ‘in front of the local store’. ‘In front of the store’ is the place in every village where unemployed men while away their hours drinking beer. In fact, the excessive drinking of alcohol is a frequent problem at Highland bacówkas. The solitary and 24-h aspect of the job are triggers in themselves, but pre-existing addictions often exacerbate the issue. When drinking is excessive, it becomes a reason for dismissal. This happens quite frequently. Problems with excessive drinking, for example, led baca Antek to replace his entire team after the 2015 grazing season.
Because of these problems, some bacas decide to hire experienced shepherds from Ukraine. This is not a widespread practice, yet, but judging by the experience of countries like Spain, Italy, Greece (Nori 2017), France, and Romania (Constantin 2003), it is likely that this trend will continue. More frequently, bacas take on people with less experience to perform more basic tasks, with hope of keeping and training the more promising prospects. This recruitment process takes the form of a lot of talking (frequently made in passing) and multiple meetings through which both parties try to ascertain each other’s expectations and then negotiate the conditions of employment. These agreements never take a form of a written contract. Rather, they are sealed with a handshake, and then, an advance is paid out. Because winter is the time of the year when some people can find themselves short of money, it is frequently easy to contract someone out. However, this honour system of recruitment is at times abused by prospective juhasi. During our fieldwork, we met bacas who told us about such winter time hires taking on a job with someone else and not returning the advance, or walking off the job so early that not even the advance was paid off by their time of employment. There is no legal remedy for such situations, and bacas seem to accept this as part of the cost of doing business.
Yet, despite the poor quality of the candidates for the job of a juhas, their pay is relatively high. A retired baca Władek explains the increased opportunity cost of labour compared to the 1980s:
The whole of the Podhale has developed. There is a great demand for builders, carpenters and the like. Today it is possible to have a good, well paid work. So the baca too has to raise the pay of the juhas. You can earn two hundred a day in construction, but you have to feed yourself. And on the sałas, from spring till autumn the baca pays him one hundred or one hundred and twenty zloty, but he feeds him and gives him smokes too.
Notwithstanding the relatively high cost of the juhasi labour to the bacas, because of the seasonal nature of this employment, the money for the juhas is not enough on a yearly scale. As juhas Wojtek, who has been doing this job for more than three decades, explains:
“What you earn in the summer, ends sometime during the winter, that's the kind of a venture it is, it is just something that you have to like doing.”
As Wojtek’s comment illustrates, having a predisposition for the job and a fondness for the animals is a recurring theme in bacas’ responses, and it seems to be key for successful, long-time hires. Baca Jasiek managed to employ two young juhasi (16 and 17 years old at the time) in 2016, with their own sheep. He was very pleased with this arrangement, despite its disadvantages; the boys could only work for him during school break, and he had to train them and supervise them much more closely because of their inexperience. Ultimately, the advantages outweighed the disadvantages, and he re-hired them for the 2017 season. As their return for a second season attests, they had the desirable ‘toughness’ which as baca Stach claimed men in the Podhale region used to have 30 years ago.
Employing young men to help rarely ends so auspiciously. Baca Darek, who travels with his sheep from the Podhale to the Babia Góra region, told us this story of recruiting three local, 17-year-old boys to help:
I tell them. I will pay you eighty zloty per day. But I say to them, I pay you in full when you last the whole week. If you quit before that, I pay you nothing. Two of them lasted one day, and the third one lasted two days (laughs). But you have to understand, they had to be here at 3am, because that's when we get up so they had to be here to help […] But this is something you really have to love to go up with the sheep and hang around them all day.
Baca Darek’s monetary offer was quite generous and equivalent to around 80% of what an adult juhas would be paid, but it was not enough. What proved especially tedious to the boys, he told us, was grazing the sheep throughout the day.
At the end of July of 2015, while driving down from his bacówka in Małe Pieniny, baca Kazek pointedly explained what he saw as the problem with juhasi today:
In the old days, the work of the juhas was totally different, the juhas was totally different... he took joy in the sheep, he would always do his best to see that the sheep were well fed, milked… (a painful sigh) And today, it is all just barely... there are no young people, there are no men with their own sheep. A guy who had fifty of his own sheep tended to them like two, otherwise... now you have to watch them, argue with them “tend to them so they will be full”, to do this and to do that, and then when I’m not there... (another painful sigh).
Kazek’s lament referred to the fact that until the 1980s, a juhas was typically also a gazda, a subsistence farmer and thus owner of a number of sheep, which would form the part of the baca’s herd for the summer. Such an arrangement was beneficial to both the baca and the juhas-gazda: the juhas would look after his own sheep during the summer season (while being paid for it by the baca). The baca could be sure that such a juhas would take care of all the sheep in the herd, as he would of his own. Furthermore, if a juhas owned his own sheep, he was also likely to understand the sheep’s grazing habits, which helped maximise the amount of milk they produced. Such juhasi also had the basic knowledge of how to treat variety of sheep’s ailments, including the common hoof inflammation (kulawki) and were able to catch the early signs that a sheep may be becoming sick. In contrast, contemporary juhasi without their own livestock are no longer stakeholders in the common herd and have become just salaried employees, whose interests are quite divergent from those of the baca. The well-being of the flock is no longer part of the utility which the juhasi seek to maximise. Other factors become of primary importance: money, cigarettes, alcohol (and the time to consume it), and getting away with as little work as possible. Thus, the key to successful hires appeared to be a vested interest in the outcome of the pastoral venture.
The second challenge - securing pastures
The second serious challenge pastoralists face is securing grazing land for their herds. Polish shepherds do not generally own the land they use for grazing, meaning that they must negotiate access and conditions of use with its owners, whether these be private farmers or public authorities. Unlike in Romania, where access to pastures is obtained through public tender organised by local mayoralities, or in Southern France, where the same is done by a communal syndicate (Constantin 2003), bacas must usually make these arrangements on an individual basis. As we detail below, however, their efforts are increasingly hampered by changes in land use due to an increasing de-population of local communities and competing land claims because of pressures on municipalities to diversify the local economic landscape (Heffner 2015). Their attempts to access pasture have also been impeded by a lack of awareness of the importance of having unhindered tracts of land to move flocks between pastures. In contrast to Spain and France, where there has been a partial push to reclaim the traditional use of drove roads (Manzano Baena and Casas 2010; Biber 2010), such traditional routes are now disappearing in Poland and transporting the herds by lorries is becoming increasingly common.
For shepherds wishing to access land in national parks and other protected areas, grazing comes to pass through special arrangements with the park administration or local government. While public property may lie within the confines of national parks, Polish pastoralists do not have any formal or customary grazing right as is the case in Sweden for example (Eriksson 2011). Beyond the need to make agreements with public authorities, however, pastoralists face a rather unique set of challenges which come with grazing their animals in the national parks. As baca Stach complained:
The shepherds of old had no problems like we do, we are in the middle of the national park, dead trees everywhere, hard to turn not to see one, but we have to get wood from a private forest, because they won't let us have those […] [The bacówka] is not some electric power plant that needs god knows how many cubic meters of wood a day, these are really small amounts, but they are a bit strange, the park people; they are a law unto themselves.
Baca Stach must purchase firewood from villagers down below which he then transports it to his hut using a horse. Being in the national park, baca Stach also engages in the previously mentioned wypas kulturowy or ‘cultural grazing’. Apart from setting limitations on the number and type of livestock shepherds may graze, ‘cultural grazing’ requires them to use traditional utensils for making cheese, as well as to dress in traditional costume and speak in local dialect for the benefit of the park’s visitors (Skawiński 2014).
Bacas who graze their flocks predominantly on privately owned land must deal with the fact that land in the mountains frequently has a complicated ownership structure. When grazing their herds near their domicile, they can usually arrange for the use of the land with each owner individually. As they move further afield from their home base, it becomes easier (and often necessary) to engage with some sort of an intermediary such as the sołtys (village mayor). However, the fragmented nature of local agricultural plots means that sometimes, some owners are able to extract from the pastoralists an unfair premium. Baca Marek working in Spisz region explains:
It is all done without any formal lease agreement. We graze it, they get the subsidies and they get something from me too. […] Sometimes someone makes problems and then you have to come to some agreement and if you can't then you have to fence this plot off, so the sheep will not wander in. […] This year we had to cut off two pieces on that side […] There, another owner wanted to cut a piece off too, but we managed to come to an agreement. […] Those two plots fortunately don't block our passage, but we need two shepherds when we graze there, which is an additional cost for me: to send an additional boy in, because one wouldn't be enough. One has to stand on one end, the other on the other to make sure the sheep don't wander in there.
The situation described by baca Marek is the result of the historical system of partible inheritance in the Polish mountains which has created a great subdivision of land resulting in plots as small as 0.05, 0.10, or 0.15 ha (Bański and Stola 2002). This fragmentation is the result of individuals, over generations, inheriting ever-smaller pieces of land, which are then shared between subsequent heirs. For the baca, not only does it mean that he has to talk to a lot of people to secure his seasonal pasture but he also has to make sure that, as he does so, he gives no offence to anyone, because anyone who feels slighted may not agree to the grazing of his land next year. Sometimes, the ownership of the required plots of land may be unresolved for years as their heirs do not claim them. There are also people who are simply unwilling to let their land be used. One reason could be a fear of dispossession that lingers on from the Communist times or some more general ‘post-socialist mistrust in collective action’ which also characterises Romania (Sutcliffe et al. 2013, 61).
Over the last 30 years, declining profitability has led to a general move away from agricultural production in Highland communities (Bański and Stola 2002). As a result there has been a significant change in the type of land that can now be utilised for pastures. Thirty years ago, the land close to the villages was used for agriculture and for grazing the cows. However, as the younger generation chooses jobs away from the villages or takes on occupations unconnected to agriculture, and older family members die, livestock is sold and the land close to the villages often lies fallow. As baca Paweł from Beskid Żywiecki explained, with this new abundance of land close by, he would be able to graze his sheep in and around the village all year round. What induces him to take the trek up to the historical alpine pastures used for generations by his family is financial incentive. This comes from a regional programme Owca Plus (Sheep Plus) financed by the region of Silesia, aimed at revitalising the highland pastures in order to protect and restore their biological diversity. Depending on the weather, baca Paweł takes his sheep up to graze on these hale (alpine pastures) for two to four weeks during the season.
Alongside the demise of agricultural production in Highland communities, the last 30 years have also seen the increasing development of rural areas. Since 1990, pastoralists have had to compete for land which can have other uses and their needs have most often not been taken into account as local councils try to attract investors. The majority of investment in the region is now directed at encouraging manufacturing and warehouse activities, rather than agricultural use of local farmland (Heffner 2015). Probably, the most pernicious development has been the acquisition and building of the so called second homes by non-locals. These homes, whose owners often seek ecologically pure regions with picturesque landscapes, ironically cause the degradation of both. Frequently, they are a part of a strategy for local development, as they are thought to bring with them an influx of cash and employment opportunities for local businesses. However, as there are no firm guidelines aimed at protecting the landscapes or the environment, the result is often an encroachment of these new structures on the areas of great environmental and landscape value (Czarnecki and Heffner 2008).
Such new developments force the sheep to move near the tops of the mountains and spread out on the yet unoccupied plots, rather than travelling along the valley floor. They limit the pastures and hinder the movement of animals across the slopes, and their new owners may not look favourably on being disturbed by sheep or being left with sheep dung on their property afterwards (Figure 4). In 2017, one of the authors of this article accompanied the juhasi of baca Jasiek for a few days during the autumn przepaski - the grazing of the sheep around the village after they have come down from the higher pasture and have encountered a cluster of three such homes situated mid mountain. In this particular case, the houses were not yet sold. There was no grass for the sheep to graze in their immediate vicinity, so they grazed on the grass around the newly barren construction site. One of the juhasi used the water feature in front to give one of his dogs a surprise bath, while the other marvelled at a custom-built tree house that went with the property. After exploring the empty properties, the juhasi retreated back up to the mountain to cross the stream.
The third challenge - accessing markets
On the face of it, the market for the primary products of Polish pastoralists - fresh, fermented, and/or smoked sheep’s cheeses for domestic consumers and spring lambs for export - appears healthy. The production and sale of unpasteurised cheeses were legalised in 2002 under the so-called Kalinowski decree, opening the retail market to Highland shepherds. Furthermore, Polish membership in the European Union since 2004 has offered pastoralists the opportunity to apply for trademark protection under the European Commission’s geographical indicator scheme. To date, Polish pastoralists have obtained the Protected Designation of Origin indicator for three traditional Highland cheeses: bryndza podhalańska (in 2007), redykołka (in 2009), and oscypek (in 2008). Furthermore, since 2010, they have been able to take advantage of the possibility of producing and selling cow’s milk cheeses during the winter months under a government directive aimed at accommodating ‘local, marginal and limited activity’ (MOL). This directive allows for the relaxation of selected hygiene rules for the production of cheeses using traditional methods and allows producers to market their goods through commercial retailers within their administrative region. However, while the legislation surrounding the production and sale of traditional pastoral foods appears supportive, fieldwork revealed that many Highland shepherds suffer from a lack of adequate commercial infrastructure to access the wider Polish market. The seasonality of pastoral production, lack of adequate storage facilities, and transportation all mean that sales are limited in terms of numbers and geographical reach. These challenges mean that the single most important factor for their commercial success remains the location of their enterprise.
A baca can legally sell his products directly to the customer at his bacówka. Baca Adam, whose bacówka near Babia Góra we visited one day in late September 2015, is an extreme example from one end of the spectrum of the location desirability. We had directions that were not as precise as we might have wished and we spent some time in the fields and forests wondering if we were choosing the right direction every time the road bifurcated. Eventually, the dirt road turned so muddy that we left the car by the roadside and continued on foot. Baca Adam was quite surprised to see us as he does not usually get many visitors, especially on rainy days. Asked to whom he sells his product, being so far away, he had this to say: “Here, to the locals, and also to the co-op. It was really problematic in the beginning. Nobody wants to come out to the forest, unless the weather is good and they really want to eat oscypek”. On the other extreme are the bacówkas situated close to roads or busy tourist paths, like the bacówka located in the Pieniny National Park which benefits from a steady customer base of park visitors. This shepherd’s hut lies on the main path into the park, just five minutes away from the entrance. Here, the shepherds not only sell a range of different cheeses but can also sell żentyca - whey, the by-product of cheese production - to passing tourists. Shepherds in other locations will generally give this away to anyone who wishes to have it, or feed their pigs and dogs with it and throw away the excess.
While there are still tourists that can walk for hours up a mountain path to reach a bacówka where they can buy an authentic product, and enjoy a more authentic overall experience of pastoralism, they are a relatively rare breed. The majority of customers are simply interested in purchasing cheese and are unwilling to travel that far or even to walk anywhere at all. As baca Mietek told us, 30 years ago, it would have been possible to have his bacówka towards the top of the slope of the pasture that stretches from the dirt road to the nearest ridge. However, most customers want to be able to drive up right up to the bacówka and not to get their city shoes dirty. Consequently, his shepherd’s hut is right next to the dirt road at the bottom of the pasture. Indeed, to be able to sell their product, many bacas construct a second, mock bacówka in some roadside location, which serves only as the shop for selling the product (Figure 5).
Other bacas are somewhere in between these two extremes, and those in more difficult locations try to develop their own, more profitable channels of distribution. Baca Kazek sells all his product directly to private customers, who keep returning and spreading good word of mouth. Sometimes, the bacas move the product between themselves. Baca Jasiek who has more favourable tourist accessible location during the holiday season sometimes sells the products of baca Antek, whose location is more difficult to access. But such an arrangement requires a great deal of trust and confidence in the other party’s product, because reputation once lost may never be recovered, or as baca Kazek’s son succinctly put, “it is not a difficult trick to fuck up one's reputation once and for all”. The situation in this respect is in line with Romania where also finding and keeping one’s own clientele is an important part of doing business (Constantin 2003). A number of pastoralists also sell their cheeses through the producers’ cooperative Gazdowie which was established in 2007. The organisation attempts to help the bacas meet the challenges of the market by trying to raise the public’s awareness of pastoralist products (especially cheeses) and their special qualities and health benefits and by buying the excess product in peak season and storing it in cold rooms until it can be sold when the cheese production dwindles towards the season’s end.
Often times, however, this type of distribution is not enough to sell all of his product. If he wants to distribute it further afield, he has to become a businessman and fall under another set regulation as well as bear the additional costs which include registering his business with its associated monthly costs, keeping records, and doing or paying for bookkeeping. Frequently, this business part of the pastoral enterprise is taken up by the baca’s wife. In this way, according to Polish law, the baca is the sheep breeder and farmer, while his wife is a businesswoman who markets and retails the product further afield (the law permits the bacas to sell directly to customers but not to the shops). This type of division of labour between men and women is quite common and can be attributed to the way things were historically divided, where the men would stay in the mountains with the sheep and the women would sell the cheeses in the nearby markets. This is similar to what may be found in Romania, where the wives of the herders sell their cheese, fighting over the best spots with local traders on the markets in Bucharest and elsewhere (Constantin 2003, 69–70).
The fourth challenge - the policy environment
On one visit to baca Jasiek, he described to us what he saw as the difference between how the pastoral enterprise was arranged once and how the contemporary agricultural policies hamper this customary way of doing things:
The most difficult thing is that the profession of shepherd isn’t defined in any legal documents in Poland, not anywhere. By law we are just ordinary animal breeders and farmers and we are not pastoralists, we do not conduct our business as the traditional szałas co-op. Because years ago the szałas meant the co-op. It wasn’t like today, when szałas means the physical hut. There was the baca, who was responsible for organising this co-op, but there were other stakeholders in it too: people who had cows and who had sheep and those who had the pastures. And that’s the szałas, this group. We try to restore it and we almost manage to do it in a traditional way.
The final set of challenges faced by Polish pastoralists is of a bureaucratic and administrative nature. As baca Jasiek pointed out, not only is the pastoralist activity not recognised and therefore not facilitated under current Polish law but also pastoralists have to work around the regulations that were created for agriculturalists. In the worst-case scenario, they find new legislation imposed on them by the government. As detailed above, government policies historically worked to restrict and control pastoralists, both with regard to the transhumant migrations and its cultural and commercial aspects. More recently, successive post-1989 Polish governments have expressed their support for pastoral agriculture. Yet, despite a lot of lip service on the part of officials, the actual policies implemented do not reflect those lofty declarations, with a special disconnection occurring between the actions and policies of the ministries of agriculture and environment. Ironically, it is the latter which is more receptive of the two to pastoralists’ needs as they coincide with the goals of the active protection of landscapes and rare species habitats. To the Ministry of Agriculture, however, pastoralists are simply regular farmers upon whom great bureaucratic and reporting burdens are placed.
At the end of the 2016 grazing season, baca Jasiek pointed out that the strict enforcement of all the existing rules could easily put an end to all pastoralist activities. He told us he had put forward a number of questions to an official from the regional government (Urząd Marszałkowski), which were left unanswered. They were the following: are the activities at bacówkas even legal from the strictly statutory point of view? Should the collecting of the sheep from different owners be considered under the registration of animal movement rules, and the moving of the herd around different pastures, under animal migration rules? If that were the case, he remarked, there would be no time for him to do any physical work because he would have to spend all his time doing the paperwork. Baca Jasiek was thus publicly pointing out the grey area in which the Polish pastoralists have been forced to operate, by virtue of not having the formal recognition of their status by the government.
It can be said that there have been no administrative measures in the agricultural policy-making in Poland aimed at helping the pastoralists, since the abolition of the Wallachian law. Not only there is no support in law for these communal practices, but there is a general feeling amongst its practitioners that the auditing processes the Polish state has put in place are divorced from the physical reality of the pastoral enterprise itself. Controllers sent in to check pastoralists’ eligibility for subsidies and certifications are frequently not at all interested in seeing the actual sheep, choosing instead to pour over every detail of the paperwork for them. Consequently, bacas feel they are not evaluated on their essence of being head shepherds, but tested on some different bureaucratic level, by people who have no practical knowledge. This is how baca Paweł described the process of obtaining European certification for his oscypek cheese:
So, a guy comes from the city of Katowice, who maybe was in a bacówka before or maybe he wasn't, and he comes to certify me! People, where are we? At least the guy honestly admitted [his lack of knowledge]. So, I say to him, ‘there at least try it, here, hold this oscypek in your hand. To which he said, ‘better not’, if I, the lowlander, should touch it, the lighting might strike the bacówka. At least he was an honest guy. But he didn't have the faintest idea about the bacówka, yet they sent him to have me certified! And he spent the whole day here, and he was paid for that. He watched how the milking is done, what the production process looks like, and so on. He was here from dusk till dawn, he was here to witness the whole process: milking, cheese making, the lot. But how did he know if I was doing things right or not if he was so clueless himself? [laughs]
Shepherds complain about the amount of paperwork required to graze, milk, and slaughter their sheep, as well as the cost of constant hygiene and food safety controls. As baca Kohut lamented:
Out of farmers, they turn us into bureaucrats. We spend more time on paperwork, and the audit is not about going into the field and checking if things are done right. They look into the paperwork. This is crazy. Did you go and check? No, because here, the calculations in the paperwork have to agree.
The ever-tightening bureaucratic authority can have unfortunate results. Rules can be imposed from above, without consultation and without taking account of the specifics of pastoral enterprise. This happened in 2015 when new rules for livestock subsidies were passed (Sejmu 2015). While the bacas were previously able to make claims for sheep alive on the 20th of May, the period that sheep now have to be ‘kept’ in the herd has been elongated to 20th of November, with the rules for goats and cows left unaffected. This means shepherds will not be able to submit claims for any sheep who fall, ill, die, or are lost to wolves over the summer. It also means that the sheep cannot be slaughtered before the November deadline - by which time the ewes are two months pregnant. The new rules thus have financial and ethical consequences for pastoralists: until now, any sheep which were deemed unfit for another season would be slaughtered in early autumn. As baca Stasiek summed it up: serce się kraje (literally ‘the heart slices itself up’) as you pull out lamb foetuses out of a dead ewe.