Ethan Kennedy is a third-year student at UNE COM. He was selected as the Biddeford Campus Student Trustee for the 2022-2023 school year. As a student trustee, he represented the voice of both undergraduate and COM students on the UNE Biddeford Campus, ensuring that the student perspective is taken into consideration while making important Board decisions.
In undergrad, Student Doctor Kennedy was a Junior National Level curler He eventually “retired" to pursue medicine. Another one of his interests, sheep showing is something he continues to do at the national level.
It’s only fitting that I write this article on my way home from the North American International Livestock Exposition (NAILE) in Louisville, Kentucky, after spending a long weekend showing sheep at the largest indoor sheep show in the world. And yes, you did read that right, I said sheep show.
The easiest way to explain a sheep show, unless you’ve seen one at the county or state fair, is to compare it to the dog shows on TV. There is a judge, and each breed has its own breed standard that an animal is evaluated against. The hope is to breed and own the animal that on the day of the show most closely fits the breed standards in the judge’s eyes, and is therefore selected as Grand Champion.
Showing livestock has been a part of my family since the late 1970’s. Specifically, my mom was raised on a beef cattle farm where my dad worked during the summers and showed their cows. When my parents got married, they moved to a farm and continued to raise and show beef cattle at the local, state, and national level. However, when I was 10, the cows were still a bit too big for me, so instead, I got my first purebred Romney sheep. I was hooked from the very first one and well, I haven’t looked back since! Since that first year, my family and I have spent summers and most of the fall traveling across the United States going to sheep shows, sheep sales, and visiting other breeders’ farms. Luckily quite a few overlap with the cow shows, but it does make for quite a hectic schedule. In the past 15 years, I have traveled to over 20 different states, shown at over 100 shows, and have been fortunate enough to win Grand Champion at every major competition in the US at least once. In 2016, I was fortunate enough to win Supreme Champion, over all thirty other breeds, at the NAILE, one of the most coveted prizes in the sheep world. For anyone on the outside looking in, the amount of time and energy I put in might seem a bit crazy, but for me, raising livestock is my passion.