Last week, Anna Smith and her husband from Christchurch’s Port Hills saw two little black lambs, formerly named Micro and Macro, listed on “Trade Me” and decided the pair would be the perfect addition to their family, according to stuff.co.nz. “My husband was really buying them for me and my daughter [two-year-old Eliza] for Christmas because we’re both huge animal lovers,” Ms Smith was quoted as saying. But, Ms Smith received a text message on Christmas Day from the woman selling the lambs informing her they had been stolen. “I was really gutted,” she said. “I felt a bit sick to be honest and kept thinking about their poor mother wondering where her lambs were.” According to Ms Smith, she spent most of Christmas Day on Facebook posting photos of the stranded lambs, citing them as stolen on different sites and advising people to share her post far and wide. At 8:30 pm, Ms Smith received a phone call from a woman who had seen Smith’s post on Facebook. She claimed that her sons had picked the lambs up from Summit Road on the day of Christmas. “I asked if they were still alive and OK and [the mother] said they had tried feeding them cows’ milk out of a baby’s bottle, which hadn’t worked obviously.” However, a while later she was contacted by another woman on Facebook. “She had seen my post…but she’d also seen some of her friends posting photos of the lambs on Christmas Eve…the boys who took them were bragging about getting some lambs for Christmas.” The Port Hills property owner who was selling the lambs told Stuff she had CCTV footage of the lambs being stolen and negated the claim they had escaped. On Christmas night, the woman who was selling the lambs picked the lambs up from a house in Aranui and was happy to find them “healthy and cared for”. Since their disappearance, the lambs’ mother, who had been “noticeably distressed”, was now on loan to the Ms Smith family until the three-week-old lambs are deterred. Ms Smith said the lambs were “incredibly cute and tame” and Eliza had wasted no time bonding with them. Eliza is the couple’s two-year-old daughter. “People on Facebook kept saying they were going to end up as someone’s Christmas lunch…that was not funny,” she said. “I’m just very happy that we found them,” she was quoted as saying.
