Vera: always someone, never something

On Tuesday the 25th of August 2026, we lost Vera.

She came to us in October 2025, three and a half weeks old, bright eyed, and unable to walk. Her tail had been docked with a knife, the way it is done to millions of lambs in Australia every year, almost always without pain relief. Completely legal. Completely routine.

For Vera, it was the beginning of a crisis that would last her whole life. Bacteria entered the wound and moved into her bloodstream, attacking her joints and damaging the nerves in her back legs, leaving them limp. She arrived here tiny and vulnerable, with a swollen elbow, legs that could not hold her, and a will to live like nothing we had ever seen.

What followed was months of fighting. The infection was the worst we have ever seen, and it did not fight fair. Every time we thought we had beaten it, it came back. Multiple surgeries. Physiotherapy. A makeshift bouncer rigged from a children's swing frame to get her upright every day. A long, intensive antibiotic course, seven of her twelve months of life, with the specialist team at Camden University Veterinary Hospital guiding her care throughout. When the damage to her front leg was beyond saving, it was amputated. Her back legs, once completely limp, slowly grew stronger. She was able to propel herself in a wheelchair, and it helped her experience more of her world.

None of that is really the story of Vera, though.

The story of Vera is the furious bleat from the lounge room every time she heard us reaching for a banana. That must be for me! And it was not just for bananas. She knew the sound of a carrot being pulled from the crisper, and her legs would run in place with excitement, eager for the treat to arrive. It is rose petals and the occasional cornflake. It is being carried to her own mattress beside our bed each night with a handful of greens picked from the garden, and carried out to her day bed each morning for breakfast before her wheelchair walk. It is the sassy toss of her head as we wheeled her at full frolic alongside the dogs who became her flock.

And when Vera slept, she dreamed. Her back legs moving, taking her on adventure.

A lamb who cannot walk still has everywhere to be, and Vera made sure we knew it. Her days had a rhythm all of their own. Breakfast on the day bed. Walks in her wheels. Long grass near the house, grazed at her own unhurried pace while the rest of the world got on with things around her. She lived in the middle of everything, because the middle of everything is exactly where she belonged.

So many of our community became part of her story along the way. When we set out to have a custom cart built for her, one moulded to her exact shape rather than adapted from equipment designed for dogs, it was your support that made it possible. Making that mould was a full team effort, a fiddly, hands-everywhere job of wrapping a very patient lamb in plaster from neck to back legs. When the first mould vanished somewhere in transit across America, we simply gathered the team and made another, better than the first. She had that effect on people. Nobody ever gave up on Vera, because Vera never once gave up on anything.

She was bright. She was hungry. She was so glad to be here. She never once lost her appetite for being alive.

On that Tuesday morning we learned that under all that sparkle, a life-threatening condition was lurking. Her liver had been failing, most likely from the infection she had fought for so long. It gave us no warning and it left us no options. This, the last battle in a war she fought for nearly her whole life, was not one she could win. We made the devastating decision to help her go before she began to suffer.

The vet team who had been with her through every setback and every surgery came together one last time. Someone found a banana. Someone else found peanuts, and horse pellets, and the staff snacks. Vera passed gently, munching, surrounded by people who loved her.

When you lose someone dear to you, a person or an animal, coming home to the empty spaces they inhabited brings its own kind of heartbreak. Clearing out the hay. Packing up her beds. Knowing there will not be a bleat the next time we reach for a banana. Her life was so woven into the tapestry of our daily life that so many little things bring our thoughts back to her throughout each day and night.

This is the space we are in right now. It is devastating. But we are so glad we got to love her.

In the days after she left us, something remarkable happened. Vera's story travelled further than it ever did while she was here. We posted a tribute to her on our social media platforms, and through that tens of thousands of people met her, most of them for the first time, many of them people who have never been invited to think of a lamb as an individual with a voice and opinions and a deep personal relationship with bananas. That is her legacy, already in motion.

Because Vera should have had a whole life. So should the millions of lambs who are mutilated the same way every spring and never get a second chance. Vera survived it long enough to show the world who a lamb actually is. Most never get that chance.

For her, and for them, we will keep telling her story.

Rest easy, little one. You were always someone, never something.