We’ve all heard the tired, out-of-touch notion of “nobody wants to work anymore” at this point, but when are we going to start digging into the vat of nonsense that is the labor market? How many internships or hourly positions require a manager to make up completely random stuff for workers to do when there’s nothing that needs to be done?
If you’re going to hire someone for a job, do it because they’re great at that job, and pay them for that job. And if they find a way to do that job better beyond your wildest dreams, as TikTok‘s @danlee3130’s newest recruit did, then pay them even more.
As you can see in the 14-second video above, Dan the farmer was in the market for a new sheepdog and took a bit of time to round up the best candidates for the position. It’s likely that he went through the motions that many employers do—”No, too friendly,” “No, too aggressive,” No, too interested in harassing the cattle against his better judgment”, before landing on the latest, most sensational hire of his farming career, a sheepgoose.
When you think about it, recruiting a goose for a sheepdog position is a galaxy-brain move from Dan. A dog may be faster and more agile and is therefore more capable of keeping the sheep boxed into a line, but on a base level, they don’t possess the intimidation factor that so many geese are capable of whipping out on the regular. Indeed, the goose needn’t concern itself with boxing the sheep in, because the sheep know better than to get on the goose’s bad side (honestly, they’re already risking quite a bit by being on the goose’s neutral side).
Now that Dan has one of the best herders in the business in his ranks, he just has to worry about the plethora of other nuances that go into raising sheep, such as shelter, bedding, figuring out fencing and pasturing, airflow for the shelter, feeding them hay, not over-feeding them on grain, providing fresh water and salt, hoof and fleece maintenance, and medical expenses such as deworming if the need arises. Including the one-time expenses like land and shelter that Dan has already taken care of, The Shepherdess suggests that raising this many sheep could cost well over $10,000, and that’s just a very rough average.
And we hear sheepgeese have a tendency to haggle…