Just a few blocks down from Owl Creek Elementary School in west Fayetteville sits the Rath home. From the street, it's just another home in the neighborhood. But as you make your way to the fenced-in backyard, it's clearly not. The rectangular backyard is much longer than it is wide. There's a children's swing set, a homemade fort wired for electricity, a vegetable garden, two chicken coops — and the yard is also home to Fayetteville's first legally permitted urban sheep.
"We've been calling them pasture puppies," says Kala Rath, the owner of these two sheep. "They're just kind of like a dog. You don't have to feel bad about leaving them outside overnight."
“The black sheep is Farley, named after Chris Farley's ‘Black Sheep.’ The white one is Callahan, after Tommy Callahan from ‘Tommy Boy.’”
Rath says she grew up in Fort Smith with dogs but had never had any other kind of animal until she moved to Fayetteville as an adult.
"Horses were where it started," she says. "And then we got the chickens and then the sheep."
Moore: Is it a bit of an "If You Give a Moose a Muffin" experience?
"That has actually been the topic of conversation here lately," Rath says, "because as it started out, we got the sheep, and then we unfortunately lost one of our chickens to a hawk this week. So then the conversation came up — do we need a Great Pyrenees to help with the predators and stuff like that? And then my husband said, I think this is starting out to be an 'If You Give a Mouse a Cookie' kind of situation. That's been brought up a couple of different times over the last week."
Rath says her reason for wanting sheep is matter of fact.
"They're so cute," she says. "And I kind of just got curious one day. I Googled the urban agriculture codes for Fayetteville, got on the website, and I noticed that bees were allowed, poultry is allowed and goats are allowed. But I didn't see sheep. I was like, well, being where we are, we share the fence with our neighbor — it's not like we live out on 20 acres or something. So I was like, well, I should check, because the last thing I would want is to just go get sheep and then a neighbor not be happy with the situation and call and complain to the city and then have to get rid of them. So I was like, well, if I'm going to do it, I want to make sure that I'm at least compliant."
You're right. That whole section should be in Rath's own words. Here it is corrected from that point:
"Can I have a sheep?" And the city told her, well, I really don't know. They asked around within the office and finally called her back with an answer.
"Well, the answer is no. But she said, it's not necessarily because we're saying you can't have them, but we just don't have anything that says you can. She's like, if you would like to come to the city and bring forward the idea of changing the urban agriculture code, you're welcome to do that. And I was like, that's too much work for sheep."
But a few hours passed and she kept thinking about it.
"That sounds fun — change the urban agriculture code for sheep. It kind of just became a thing. So one morning I was at the gym and I was like, I'm going to get on the website and look at the city council, just looking through all the photos. And I was like, which one is most likely to give me sheep? I saw Sarah Moore. I was like, I like her."
"I don't know how to respond to that," Moore says.
Sarah Moore is a Fayetteville City Council member for Ward 2. She says there's a decent number of nuts and bolts that go into a decision like this.
"We have conversations with city staff. We look at state law. We look at, locally, what would be the spectrum of things that we might have to think about. You have to think about, with a live animal, the noise — you have to talk about the smells, the accommodations that might be needed. Because we want to make sure that we're protecting the health and safety of our two-legged, four-legged residents alike."
When it came time to consider amendments to the Urban Agriculture Code, there was some education involved in determining how to regulate the sheep. At first they considered limitations by breed, but they discovered it's not quite as common to have purebred sheep as it may be for other types of animals. So instead they provided limitations around the size of the sheep. And because sheep are herd animals, the code requires a minimum of two.
Moore says even though it was a relatively simple ordinance process, it still involved a lot of departments.
"You have to get the attorneys involved, so they've got to look at the legal language. We had development services because they ultimately manage and tackle the code. We brought animal services in — shout out to Justine Lentz, who helped us as well. Staff was kicking this around. And on top of it, it took our resident, who had a little bit of knowledge and more in-depth expertise about sheep, to add that into the conversation to tweak it further. I think oftentimes the best type of rules that we put in place in the city, or guardrails that make us better, combine the expertise out in our community. We have an incredible community with so much experience and expertise in so many different fields."
On June 2, on the final agenda item, the Fayetteville City Council voted unanimously to pass the amended Urban Agriculture Code. Moore also proposed an emergency clause to the amendment. She says that because baby sheep are typically born and sold in the spring, many have already been spoken for by this point in the year.
"We don't want a delay in the event that there are folks that want to take advantage of this ordinance to be able to move forward with that for themselves and their families," she says.
The emergency clause passed unanimously as well.
David Rath is Kala's husband. He describes her and her ideas as unstoppable.
"She told me that she was trying to get the thing done with the city, and I told her that was the most Leslie Knope thing I'd ever seen," he says. "We watched the city council meeting on her laptop, and as soon as everybody voted for it, we were just laughing. It's like, OK, I guess we're getting sheep. At that point you're just kind of like, what's a couple more animals?"
Kala had preemptively reached out to a few places and found out that Barnyard Buddies in Springdale had exactly two still available. She brought them home just the day before the interview.
"They were so content in the dog crate that I had to text my neighbor and see if her husband could come help me take the dog crate to the backyard because I couldn't get them out," she says. "They were just both laying there, just chilling. It was hilarious because they brought a wheelbarrow to come help me because they didn't know what the situation was going to look like. I was just like, I need help unloading sheep out of the car. And I told her, I was like, I wish I could tell you this would be the craziest thing that I'm going to ask you, but the way things are going, I can't promise this is going to be the craziest thing I text you. Her husband and daughter brought the wheelbarrow across the sidewalk, three or four houses down, to help unload the sheep."
Sarah Moore says she's already seen how the community has come together around Farley and Callahan.
"Connections from different neighbors who are coming and pitching in to help and assist with the sheep, visiting the sheep — these are ways to connect neighborhood fabrics even more tightly together," she says. "And the more that that occurs, then you're more apt to reach out to your neighbor in those times when you're more troubled."
She says she hopes this experience is an opportunity for residents to better understand the city government is for the people and to not be intimidated to talk to your city council member about concerns you have, whether that's a street light or sheep or anything in between.
"They get to determine what the rules are and where we spend our money and how we shape our world,” she says. “And so I really hope that the sheep are a gateway into how we can come up with other things that can just really improve and shape the world that we have in the city of Fayetteville."
Moore: Are you going to stick to two?
"I would like to say no," she says. "And if I said no, my husband would probably say, give it time. Three is the max that we're allowed here. But there is one specific breed that has little black feet that I really love. And maybe next spring we'll figure out what we're doing with these two and maybe give it some time. That's why I told the kids the other day, I was like, if we buy all of the farm animals right now, come next spring we're maxed out, we can't do anything else. So we got to save the fun for next spring."
You can find pictures of Farley and Callahan at kuaf.com.
For Ozarks at Large, I'm Matthew Moore.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
