Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.
My name is Dan Schreiber, I'm sitting here with Anna to set speed James Harkin and Andy Murray.
We're also joined by special guest Rufus Hound,
and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days,
and in a particular order here we go, starting with you, Mr Hound.
Well Dan, twice in its history, America has been run by a shepherd.
So we got that fact through and I have no idea what that means.
Twice the resident of the White House has also been a keeper of sheep.
The first of them was Thomas Jefferson, who when he lived on his plantation had corn and wheat and tried to rotate them,
but found that the soil was rapidly blitzed essentially, and then realised that sheep were the way forward,
that they fertilised the soil they were super animals,
and so when he was president he actually bought sheep with him to the White House,
and the ram that he was most pleased with in terms of the sheep that he thought would become America's sheep was a Shetland ram.
Now in the early days of America, when we think of the White House,
we're obviously thinking of something behind layers and layers and layers of security,
but it used to be a house and you could walk on those grounds.
So the sheep were in the White House grounds, in the lawn or whatever, but this ram was incredibly violent.
There are official letters from William Keough, who states that he was left black and blue by this ram,
and in another letter it transpires that actually a small boy was killed by one of Jefferson's rams.