Hefting onto place: intersecting lives of humans and sheep on Scottish hills landscape

Abstract

This paper analyzes the phenomenon called hefting of sheep onto the landscape of hill sheep farms in the Scottish Borders. It is based upon data collected during extended periods of ethnographic fieldwork beginning in 1981 and continuing to the present. Hefting is the term used by sheep farmers for the natural tendency of hill sheep to graze, remain, and bond onto specific areas of the landscape without the need for fencing. The herding practices of hill sheep farms appropriate hefting in flock management and breeding. The analysis of hefting makes two contributions to understanding human–animal relations. First, because the of the centrality of territorial bonding, hefting makes explicit that we should always be ready to include a third dimension—place and emplacement—in understanding human–animal relations. Second, drawing on Haraway's concept of "becoming with," hefting and herding demonstrate the fundamentally relational character of human–animal–place relations.