Sheep

Sheep appear both as livestock in a history of forced dispossession and as the sharpest image in Burke Devore’s account of corporate downsizing. In his analogy, people who have built their lives around land or work can be treated as replaceable whenever an owner sees a more profitable use for what they occupy.

Historical Use

Burke recalls that, until the late eighteenth century, tenant farmers in the Highlands lived in small stone huts and eked out a living from the soil while paying rent to landlords. The decisive change came when landlords, or those acting as their accountants, saw that the land could earn more if its human inhabitants were replaced by Sheep.

Over roughly seventy years, the Clearances removed families, clans, and villages from the land and put Sheep in their place. The tenants had lived there for generations and built houses, barns, and corrals, yet had no legal ownership to protect them. The contrast is central to Burke’s account: people could make a place their home through labor and inheritance of experience, while remaining powerless against the person who owned it.

Displacement and Cost

The dispossession was not voluntary. Those driven away went to Ireland or North America; some died of cold or starvation, while others resisted and were killed on the land they had called their own. Sheep are presented as the profitable replacement in this history, while the human cost falls on people whose attachment to the land does not give them control over it.

Burke says he learned this history in college and enjoyed history courses because they were stories. The episode therefore reaches him not only as an account of economic change but as a memorable narrative of who had the power to clear a place and who was made to leave it.

Corporate Metaphor

On a 3-by-5 card pinned above his office desk, Burke carries the history into the present. He likens the descendants of the landlords—literal descendants in some cases, spiritual descendants in others—to those directing corporate downsizing. In the modern version, the desk takes the place of the tenant’s home: an employee may give a company years of loyalty and effort, but ownership can still decide that another worker will yield greater profit.

The metaphor gives Sheep a deliberately instrumental role. They are not individualized animals in the narrative; their significance lies in their position as the replacement that makes the land more profitable. Burke’s comparison turns that economic calculation back on the worker: the person being displaced is treated as another occupant to be cleared when the owner sees a more lucrative alternative. The card’s history thus supplies a compact model for his understanding of corporate power and disposability.