World

Photo: The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

In this Tuesday, Oct. 9, 2012 photo, a sheep nuzzles the hand of prizewinning sheep breeder Ousmane Ndiaye as he explains the pedigree of each of his dozen animals, in the sheltered rooftop pens he has specially constructed for them atop his home in the HLM neighborhood of Dakar, Senegal. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

The street level of Ousmane Ndiaye's building features a fabric shop. He and his family live in a posh apartment on the second floor. Their upstairs neighbours? His beloved ram Billal and 10 other sheep.

Here his animals prance on a sunny outdoor terrace well above the commotion of buses and vendors below, and only rarely use the building's winding staircase.

Billal is fed the family's dinner leftovers, and Ndiaye jokes that his wife is jealous of his sheep. The family even foregoes potential rental income by leaving the upper level of their building unfinished.

"I could rent this place out for 250,000 francs ($500) a month, but I prefer to keep Billal and my sheep here," says Ndiaye, 60, sporting a royal blue boubou as he strokes the head of the sheep he hopes will become a reality television star.

In a nation where sheep are given names and kept inside homes as companion animals, the most popular television show is "Khar Bii," or literally, "This Sheep," in the local Wolof language.

It's an American Idol-style nationwide search for Senegal's most perfect specimen. Now in its fourth season, the show airs several times a week in the months leading up to Eid al-Adha, or Tabaski, as it's known here.

The feast of sacrifice is when Muslims around the world slaughter animals in remembrance of Abraham's near-sacrifice of his son.

In Senegal, the sheep's ties to the important religious holiday have made them a part of many urban families in this predominantly Muslim country of 12.8 million people. Still, every family that can sacrifices a ram at Tabaski, when an estimated 712,000 sheep will be purchased for slaughter. Some 240,000 of those are in the Dakar region alone, where supermarkets are already offering scratch tickets for a chance to win a free Tabaski sheep.

"The Senegalese are really into their sheep," says Fadilou Keita, 28, who lives with six of them by night at his Dakar home. The financial analyst carries his iPad in one hand and sticks his other in the mouth of Aziz to drag him toward the weigh-in scale. "This is my passion."

Even for the sheep who don't win cash prizes, there is still plenty of love. Lamine Diop, a 33-year-old post office worker, keeps a photo of Eto'o on his cellphone.

"I treat him like a brother," Diop says of the animal named for Cameroonian soccer player Samuel Eto'o. "A sheep is a part of the family. When the sheep is sick, it's like a member of the family is sick."