They’re not goats! Hair sheep found after being on the lam in Belleville and Swansea
The escape of two “goats” has been a hot topic on Facebook, with people posting photos and videos of them roaming around Belleville and Swansea and inspiring plenty of baaaaaad jokes.
But they’re not goats, according to the breeder, Tillo Agne, who sold them before they went missing two weeks ago. They’re “hair sheep,” which are sheep with hair instead of wool.
Both of the hair sheep were back at Agne’s rural Belleville farm on Wednesday. A family contacted him on Tuesday morning to report that the ram (male) had been staying in their barn near Fletcher’s Kitchen & Tap on Old Collinsville Road in Swansea since June 26.
A couple hours later, Agne got another tip about the ewe (female). He captured it behind Dutch Hollow Village mobile-home park, off Illinois 161 in Belleville.
“(The ewe) went quite a ways,” said Agne, 45, who had sold both of the hair sheep to a man who lives near Old Collinsville Road and Frank Scott Parkway about two months ago. “I’d say she walked pretty close to seven miles in the circle that she made.”
The new owner, Sam Dannoon, couldn’t be reached for comment.
He had posted a photo of the hair sheep on the Metro East Crime Facebook page. The ram is mostly white with black markings and small horns. The ewe is mostly black with white markings.
Agne said he thought Dannoon had a fenced-in yard when he sold him the hair sheep, but he later discovered that they had been tied up with ropes, which aren’t secure, when they escaped.
“Both of them are fine for the most part, except for the rope burns on their legs,” Agne said Wednesday. “(The ewe’s) skin had started to grow around the rope. That’s my project today. I didn’t want to stress her out anymore yesterday after catching her and traveling with her.”
Residents help with search
The case of the missing hair sheep intrigued people following it on Facebook, as well as Belleville and Swansea residents who saw them roaming around neighborhoods, clearly out of their element.
Wolfgang Bronnbauer and his girlfriend, Makayla Hawks, had to do a double-take on July 1, when they spotted the ewe walking down a driveway across from Bronnbauer’s apartment building on Bristow Lane in Belleville, not far from the MotoMart gas station on Illinois 159.
Hawks shot video with her cellphone and posted it on the Metro East Crime Facebook page.
“I actually called the cops,” said Bronnbauer, 21. “(The hair sheep) was here for a while, but he got scared off by a dog before the cops arrived. He ran behind a house and headed toward some woods.”
The ewe ended up on Hecker Street and hung out in Lisa Peters’ back yard for a while.
She called St. Clair County Animal Services, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and St. Clair County Farm Bureau, asking what could be done about the hair sheep. All referred her elsewhere.
“I tried to get (the ewe) to come to me, but it wouldn’t,” said Peters, 54. “It was bleating at my kids, and I thought, ‘Is that a good sound or a bad sound?’ Then it just walked down the hill around by my pond and disappeared.”
People also reported “goat” sightings near Old Collinsville Road and Frank Scott Parkway in Swansea, Sullivan’s bar and restaurant in Belleville and Althoff Catholic High School.
The last ewe sighting posted on Facebook was behind Dutch Hollow Village. Someone shot video while following it along the MetroLink bike trail and set it to the “Mission Impossible” theme song.
“Some people were almost chasing it,” Agne said. “But you can’t do that and expect to catch it. They get too scared.”
Cars and coyotes pose danger
Tillo Agne III operates T3 Farm, a small farm near Belleville West High School, with his wife, Amanda. His grandfather and namesake co-owned the old Belleville Dairy, which delivered milk to people’s doors in the mid-1900s.
Agne’s hair sheep are a cross between Katahdin and Dorper breeds. They eat grass and weeds in the summer.
The biggest challenges for the ram and ewe that escaped two weeks ago were finding water sources and avoiding being hit by vehicles on city streets, Agne said, but they would have been killed by coyotes in the country.
It’s unclear how the hair sheep got separated.
The ram made its way to lodging in the Swansea barn fairly quickly. The ewe wandered for more than a week, ultimately settling in a wooded area behind the mobile-home park, next to fencing that formed a corner nook with access to a creek. That’s where Agne found it on Tuesday afternoon.
“I just put a little bit of grain on the ground and stood back and let her get used to me, and then I grabbed her by the leg real quick and picked her up and carried her,” he said. “Like I told everybody, you have to do it calmly.”
Hair sheep are raised to be pets, or they’re butchered for meat, Agne said. They sell for about $3 a pound, so that’s $150 for a young one weighing 50 pounds or $450 for an older one weighing 150 pounds.
The Agnes still had 14 hair sheep after selling the ram and ewe to Dannoon. They also grow vegetables and raise cattle, goats, turkeys and other livestock.
“(Hair sheep) need a fence in some form, cattle panels or something tall that they’re not going to jump over,” Tillo Agne said. “I use electric fencing, so they know they can’t cross it.”
This story was originally published July 8, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
