By Dan Irwin
It’s tough to infuse real-life experience into a drive-through nativity.
After all, virgin births have been fairly rare over the last couple of millennia.
And while reality-show hosts abound, the heavenly kind are a little harder to book.
Ah, but shepherds — now that’s one role where Westfield Presbyterian Church won’t have to rely totally on actors. When the Mount Jackson congregation stages its live manger scene this weekend, it will have a 100 percent, dyed-in-the-wool sheep tender among its cast.
That’s Debbie Replogle, who has spent nearly three decades as a working shepherd at Enon Valley-area farms. She even keeps a handful of her own sheep at the A-frame home she shares with her husband, Melvin, just a half-mile down Westfield Road from the church.
Here, Christmas is all “baa” and no “humbug.”
“It’s very special to be able to have the animals to take up and participate in the live nativity scene,” Replogle said. “The fact that I’m working with the animal that Jesus compared us to so much — I think about that, and how their characteristics relate to real people.”
Pastoral imagery abounds in Scripture. Jesus, for example, is portrayed not only as the Good Shepherd but also as the Lamb of God. A parable he tells in Matthew Chapter 18 demonstrates how a shepherd with 100 sheep will leave 99 to find one that has wandered off.
Stories like that resonate with Replogle, who refers to each animal under her care as a someone, rather than a something.
“Sometimes (Gateway Farm owner Fred Martsolf, Replogle’s employer) phases someone out that might be a little too old for what he wants on the farm, somebody that might have a problem,” she said, indicating the sheep in the pasture adjacent to her home. “One of these in here is blind. I hauled her out of the creek a couple of times. She stumbled over the bank into the creek, and I’d go find her.
“So she’s up here, and a couple other ones that were just getting too old and had some health problems, I brought them up here.”
For Replogle, that kind of love started early on.
THINKING OF EWE
Replogle’s home is built on the back 40 of the dairy farm where she grew up. Cvetan’s Willow Run Farm folded in 2002, although the land still remains in her family.
“It started out when my parents got us orphan lambs, and we raised those through the summer,” she recalled.
That spark was later fanned into flame by a job she got at a now-defunct sheep farm owned by Guy and Bill Fullerton, just two miles from her home.
“He handed me the bottle one day and told me to go out and feed the baby lamb,” Replogle said. “That really got me hooked on it again.
“Later, they called me to be a shepherd for them, and I worked there for 10 years. It was wonderful. You don’t see shepherding jobs very often, and this one was just two miles away from home. When they sold out, I thought I would never find another shepherd job again. And didn’t someone (Martsolf) four miles down the road call me, and I’ve worked there for 17 years.”
No doubt, the live nativity will call to mind biblical images of shepherding, such as David slaying both a lion and a bear to protect his father’s flock.
“She hasn’t had to do any of that,” Melvin Replogle said. “She doesn’t carry her slingshot.”
Nowadays, his wife explained, there’s a more high-tech solution to the problem of predators.
“We are always in the confinement of an electric fence of some sort,” she said. “That doesn’t mean the coyotes haven’t come in. But for the most part, we feel pretty safe with the electric fence.”
NOT A CROOK
The hooked staff of shepherding lore also has been pretty much confined to history, but one part of the ancient job remains intact: moving the flock from pasture to pasture.
“The confinement of them means that you’re going to deal with more parasites,” Replogle explained. “You manage the pastures by rotating them. When they’re off it, then the pasture grows back up. It gives a chance to get rid of the parasites there.
“Then in month, you can come back to the original pasture. You just keep rotating them around through the farm.”
The job of shepherding begins in the spring, assisting with lambing, Replogle said. Each lamb is then ear-tagged and weighed, and the mother is checked to make sure she has enough milk for her babies. The ewe “are very good at having twins on a regular basis,” she said, and most of the time, that is not a problem.
Occasionally, though, they have triplets, and “that’s maybe when you’ll have an orphan lamb. You have to pull off one and let her raise the twins, and we raise the other artificially.”
The sheep then receive injections and drenches (worming medication) for parasite control, and are moved from pasture to pasture throughout the summer. In the winter, they are fed hay, and in the spring, the cycle begins anew.
“Sometimes I just go out and visit with them, see who might not be feeling good, and just pet them,” Replogle said. “That’s one way I get a lot of pets — I call them friends — out of it, raising them up from orphan lambs, then reintegrating them into the flock.
“Those are the ones who are always friendly.”
FOOD, NOT WARMTH
At the first farm where Replogle worked, the sheep were raised for wool, and shearing was a regular part of the routine as well.
Gateway Farm, though, raises Katahdin hair sheep, which are sold for meat and don’t require shearing.
“They just shed it out, like a dog,” Replogle said.
“In the spring,” her husband added, “you’ll see patches of it laying around in the field.”
Moreover, wool is renewable resource — that is, it grows back after it is shorn. A sheep raised for meat, on the other hand, is a one-time proposition. When it is harvested, it’s gone. That’s the toughest part of Replogle’s job.
“It’s bad when you lose someone, certain ones,” she said. “And it’s hard when you’re culling the flock, the ones that are too old or something’s wrong with them, and they aren’t ones I want to buy off my boss and bring here. They go to the sale barn, and you feel bad.”
Nonetheless, Replogle can’t imagine ever doing anything else.
“I like being outside,” she said. “I’ve been doing this for 27 years, and I’ve been very blessed. You just don’t have shepherd’s jobs in the newspaper.
“I feel sorry for people who don’t enjoy their work, because I really enjoy mine.”
