According to some assessments, the Maghreb is one of the Mediterranean regions most affected by human activity. Pastoralism, a dominant activity of the Berber populations in place since prehistory, is undoubtedly the essential cause. Agriculture only effectively intervened in North Africa with the advent of the Phoenicians, then the Romans. Even if certain crops have definitively established themselves (cereals, fruit trees, vines), the Arab conquest and then the French occupation amplified in their turn the breeding of sheep and goats, the number of which has only increased to the present day, where it is exponential and in total inadequacy with the available resources, even in good years of useful rain. The Maghreb, including Morocco, has therefore never enjoyed a rational use of the soil, and the beginnings of the degradation of forest landscapes are ancient. Fortunately, and now stabilised, the strong population growth of recent decades (the population had quadrupled in sixty years) was responsible for the increase in herds, essentially in steppe zones. This is a dramatic situation for fragile ecosystems, most of which are arid and have very low regenerative power. If we go into details through an anecdotal and local approach to methods, we observe the maintenance of irrational options whose common denominator always tends towards a greater number of heads, sometimes even for the sake of prestige alone and even if it means having to proceed to the sacrifice of lambs in certain seasons (Timahdite region in the Middle Atlas).

Human pressure is obviously not only exerted by livestock farming and its intensive grazing deep into forest formations, an astonishing practice only present on this shore of the Mediterranean. Other impacts, the intensity of which varies according to the region and which continue to increase, also count to the detriment of the biopatrimony. The second factor in the destruction of the Moroccan landscape is undoubtedly the application of inadequate forest treatments, which seriously hinder the functioning of forest ecosystems. This forestry on an agronomic mode eliminates all competition up to the total eradication of the undergrowth. It is excessively harmful and leads to irreversible abolitions. These indiscriminate silvicultural treatments, inherited from European silviculture and already highly criticised in more temperate zones, with their clear-cutting, thinning, and simple coppice, generate a global disturbance that adds to deforestation of diverse origins. The corollary of this disappearance of the plant cover (35,000 hectares per year) organising the green screen of the mountains is soil erosion. The damage caused by the forester thus joins that of the shepherd, enough to "wonderfully" exaggerate the climatic misdeeds of a certain global warming.

Many other evils influence the dysfunction of the country's ecosystems, mortgage the future of biomass and genetic capital, contribute to trivialising biodiversity through the annihilation of valuable species, which always have lower resilience, and generally ransack the landscape horizon. A more and more realistic fear of the depletion of resources is manifesting itself, particularly at the levels of soil and water, which are not inexhaustible. The increase in favoured areas of modern agriculture and its harmful procession based on clearing, land consolidation, and bioterrorism through chemical pollution, just like certain developments of poorly understood tourism, are other recurring themes that follow overgrazing and forestry in the leading group of major threats and the growing dissensus between nature and civilisation. Individual attitudes, still too often absent of citizenship, without the slightest respect for living things, or prey to old and cruel demons, also count in the balance, if only through the ugliness and pollution of landscapes.

The Barbary sheep (Ammotragus lervia) populates Egypt, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Sudan, Chad, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. This species, classified as vulnerable, which sees its numbers declining due to changes in its environment and abusive hunting, has been introduced in the Canary Islands, in the south-west of the United States, and in Mexico. Its coat is light fawn, its hair is medium-long and thick on the body, extremely long on the front legs and along the entire length of the underside of the neck; the male measures one metre at the withers for a weight of 115 kg. As with all bovids and unlike cervids, its horns are permanent. They are remarkably developed in the male sex. During the mating season, males show themselves to be aggressive and their fights are very spectacular. After a gestation of 170 days, the female gives birth to one or two young. The animal's lifespan is about fifteen years. Also known in Morocco by the name of aoudad, the Barbary sheep is an excellent climber of steep areas, particularly sub-Saharan ones. Its diet is very frugal, feeding on herbaceous plants and brush. It can live without drinking, contenting itself with dew. It evolves rather in small family groups, composed of one adult male and two to five females, each accompanied by its offspring. It is a bovid of the genus Ammotragus which is represented only by this single species, intermediate between the sheep and the goat. This is why it belongs to the subfamily of caprines (like the chamois or the ibex of the genus Capra). In Morocco, the population of the Barbary sheep is estimated at more than a thousand animals, most of them within protected areas.

Let's talk a little about origins...

The ancestor of the domestic goat (Capra hircus) is the bezoar goat of Armenia (Capra aegagrus). The bezoar is that concretion of the stomach and intestines of herbivores to which medicinal virtues were once attributed (the bezoar stone was an antidote).

As for our dear domestic sheep (Ovis aries), cytogenetic analysis confirms that it descends from the mouflon of Asia Minor (Ovis orientalis), the smallest species of the genus Ovis and which also possesses 54 chromosomes, with a possible influence of the urial of Armenia (Ovis vignei). According to naturalist-historians and archaeological discoveries, the date of its domestication would oscillate around the 8th millennium BC, just after that of the dog and the goat.

From Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, the practice of its breeding would have spread towards Persia then to the Mediterranean basin. Several waves invaded Europe: the urial as far as Switzerland via the Balkans, the mouflon of Asia Minor as far as Great Britain via Germany and Denmark, and finally the Mesopotamian sheep on the Mediterranean coast via Egypt. Knowing also that mouflons survived in the wild in the Europe of the Middle Ages, it would be very hazardous to construct the genealogy of current breeds, and the thesis of a multicentric origin, coming as much from cultural exchanges as from a convergence of ideas, is the one retained. However, it is accepted that the Corsican-Sardinian mouflon (ovis orientalis musimon) does not deserve to be qualified as such: it is a scenario of "marronnage", or a sheep gone wild after its abandonment on these islands. At the end of the Bronze Age, the Soay island sheep met an identical fate. These breeds indeed possess a woolly fleece that betrays their previous domestication, because in the wild mouflon only the undercoat of the fur is woolly.

Humans have progressively selected animals in order to reduce the coarse guard hair in favour of the fine woolly down. There are about 450 breeds of domestic sheep, with respective selections for types of pastures, climates, and altitudes, according to a very rich polymorphism (size, colour, number of horns, shape of ears, type of fleece..) since there even exists (not a five-legged sheep...), but a sheep without wool!

Providing milk, meat, and wool, gregarious and devoid of aggressiveness but having inherited from the mouflon a developed sensitivity (keen sight, fine hearing, excellent sense of smell), the sheep could only seduce man. It should be known that there is a fairly constant ratio of one sheep for every three humans...