The shared table

We've had five new baby lambs safely delivered on our farm - with no help from us whatsoever.  Phew!  Dodged a bullet there.  Bettie heroically delivered three.  She was pretty big, and very uncomfortable. We've got perhaps one more to come and have pretty well given up on names.  We started with chalky but then a few more chalkboards arrived and now we are struggling to tell them apart.  Did you know you are not allowed to call a blackboard a blackboard any more?  Head farmer and husband found this out in the local hardware store recently searching for blackboard paint to put up on a wall in our preserving room.  He was momentarily denied service by a surly store woman as she corrected him over and over again, saying 'No we don't have blackboard paint.  We have chalkboard paint'. So that's how the little guy on the left got his name.  There's a theory on farms that once you have a name you don't end up on a plate.  That will certainly be the case on our farm.  These little guys will grow up on this five star animal resort being none the wiser.  And costing us a small fortune as ute load after ute load produces more bags of animal feed with not much grass around, for the privileged mouths and beaks on this property.  Unfortunately they all support the shared table philosophy, that what's in your bowl is also mine when you're done with it. The chooks are eating the leftover lamb feed pellets and the thought of this now entering into our food chain via eggs scares me - just a little.   About 11pm every night Bennie our best in class cocker spaniel sneaks down the stairs to polish off the cat's food provided we haven't given Max's food to Minnie as she sits at the kitchen window looking in like something out of the movie Oliver, just not quite so undernourished.   Max won't eat anything that isn't out of a can or pouch and Bennie's gastronomical experiment with eating blood and bone out of the garden beds ended badly all over my new lounge room rug.  So food is a shared experience in my home.  Sometimes I wish it wasn't though.