Short answers, pulled from the story.
Sheep, or domestic sheep (Ovis aries), are a domesticated, ruminant mammal kept as livestock. They are raised mainly for fleeces, meat known as lamb and mutton, and sheep milk, and are also occasionally kept for pelts, as dairy animals, or as model organisms for science.
There are around 1.2 billion domestic sheep as of 2019, making them easily the most common species of sheep. China, Australia, India, Nigeria, and Iran have the largest modern flocks.
Sheep were domesticated between 11,000 and 9000 BC in Mesopotamia, making them among the earliest animals domesticated by humans. They most likely descend from the wild mouflon of Europe and Asia, with Iran at the center of the domestication area.
Lamb is the meat of immature sheep less than a year old, while mutton is the meat of mature sheep usually at least two years of age. The word mutton derives from the Old French moton, used by the Anglo-Norman rulers of the British Isles in the Middle Ages.
A University of Illinois monograph reported sheep intelligence to be just below that of pigs and on par with cattle. In a 2001 study in Nature, Kenneth M. Kendrick and colleagues reported that individual sheep can remember 50 other sheep faces for over two years and recognize humans by their faces.
Dolly was a Finnish Dorset sheep cloned at the Roslin Institute of Edinburgh, Scotland in 1996, the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell. Scientific American dubbed her the world's most famous sheep, following the 1995 cloning of two ewes named Megan and Morag from differentiated cells.
Sheep are substantially more vulnerable to copper toxicity than other livestock because copper acts as a cumulative poison that they excrete very slowly. Feeding on plants such as heliotropes can release stored copper from the liver all at once, resulting in sudden death.