The Last Shepherd : Luigi Viso Will Bring Family Tradition to a Close as Modernity Takes Its Toll

It’s an old shepherds’ trick:

If a baby lamb dies, skin the carcass. Then, when another sheep has twins, take one of the twins and cover it with the dead lamb’s skin. The mother of the dead animal will pick up the scent of her offspring and nurse the twin.

For 63-year-old Luigi Viso and his ancestors, this tradition--handed down to him by his father in Sicily--has worked for centuries to preserve the family flock. But now, there is no trick that will save the shepherding legacy in Viso’s family.

His son refuses to don the mantle of a shepherd. And so, three generations spent at the subtle, centuries-old art of shepherding will soon come to an end on a lonely Calabasas hilltop.

“The boy doesn’t want no part of it,” said Viso, looking out from the tiny compound he built above Las Virgenes Road. “He’s single. An electrician for the DWP. No family. What else can I do?”

Viso’s question, heavy with his Sicilian accent, lingers in the air. A car horn sounds 100 yards beneath him on Agoura Road, a reminder that he has run out of time for an answer.

A host of modern-day developments is quickening the end of shepherding in the Viso family: Two commercial projects are planned on his leased pastureland. While he can cope with an occasional hungry coyote, the more frustrating threat to his flock has been persistent urban thieves, he says.

By the end of the year, Viso’s menagerie of goats, Australian sheep dogs and five dozen sheep--a Calabasas institution for 20 years--will be herded from the land by the two planned retail centers.

The Baldwin Co., which leases the land to Viso for his compound just above the intersection of Las Virgenes and Agoura roads, will build a 200,000-square-foot commercial center. Next door, where Viso’s sheep sometimes graze, Pazar Associates will begin constructing a smaller, yet similar, retail development.

With no one to carry on for him, Viso says he may retire to Reno, perhaps with a few head of sheep.

It’s a fate Viso accepts wearily.

“Since I was 5 years old, I was with sheep. I’m so close to them, it looks like the sheep raised me,” Viso said, tucking his ear beneath a red wool cap. “I like shepherding for a hobby. You watch TV. Somebody else plays golf. I do it just to pass the time.”

But a once-peaceful hobby has taken a stressful turn.

“Twenty years ago, you could stay here comfortably,” Viso says of his Calabasas retreat. “You could keep the gate open and nobody would bother you. You can’t keep the gate open any more. Too many people come in all the time. Steal a lamb, steal a dog. I’m tired of it.” Viso toiled for more than 30 years as a brick mason since coming to the United States in 1949, carving out a home in Calabasas. But being a shepherd, even part time, was all that ever really mattered.

Every morning, Viso spends an hour or two before work tending to his sheep. He wakes before dawn to release the sheep from their ramshackle pen and they spill onto the grassy hillsides.

If one spot has been overgrazed, Viso hauls his flock in the back of his truck to fresh grass. Nearby landowners are grateful for the flock, which trims their greenery enough to satisfy local fire officials.

“Everybody calls them lawn mowers,” Viso said, laughing.

Viso, however, has a name for every sheep. There’s Linda, Julia, Milkshake, and Willard--after TV weatherman Willard Scott. Viso has two types of sheep: African hybrid--good meat, he says--and Merino: good wool.

But when Viso moves the flock, he never calls out their names. Instead, he calls on his sheep dogs, which nip at the heels of the nervous creatures to guide their path. Often, he speaks Sicilian to the dogs, peppered with American profanity.

Yet Viso never speaks his native tongue to the sheep. Ask him why, and he just smiles. “You can’t speak Sicilian with the sheep,” he said. “They don’t know anything. They’re dumbbell sheep.”

At one point, Viso and a partner had more of these dumbbells than he could count. Ironically, it was Viso’s son who brought Dad back into the family business.

“My kid wanted a sheep,” Viso said. “We kept this baby sheep in the back yard. Then there was another and another. Then I came here. I used to have 1,400 sheep.

But a hobby that he could once support by selling wool soon became a financial hardship as wool prices plummeted from $1 to 50 cents a pound. Most of the sheep were eventually sold.

With no profit in shepherding, Viso takes pleasure in the little things. Milking the sheep, making Picorino cheese, delivering baby lambs.

But it will soon end. Wherever he takes what’s left of the flock will be a one-way trip, Viso said.

“What the hey,” Viso said with a shrug, watching the sheep settle down for the night. Then he spied a wayward lamb making off with her mother. His fate was forgotten as his instincts kicked in, and he chased the lamb into the sunset.