While writing this chapter we were shocked by newspaper headlines concerning a sheep massacre: in October 2017 a flock of 135 sheep and 4 sheep dogs were found brutally slaughtered and abandoned in a plot of land near Ploaghe, Sassari district, northern Sardinia, while the shepherd vanished. 1 According to rumors and early investigations, the owner of the flock, a 62-year-old shepherd, was exasperated by the local dairy cooperative’s refusal to buy his milk because it contained too heavy a bacterial load. Unquestionably, this could be hardly considered a reason or a justification for such a bloodbath, an extreme gesture “of a madman,” as one of our interlocutors suggested. However, as in the case of the celebrated—and anthropologically inspired—“great cat massacre”(Darnton 1999), this tragic episode may be a vantage point to explore the economic sociocultural context in which sheep milk production and its commercialization takes place in contemporary Sardinia. Interestingly, while most online commentators of the sheep massacre vehemently condemn and stigmatize the shepherd for his “brutality” and “primitiveness,” according to many others, his gesture needs a nuanced contextualization in order to understand the genuine motives, beyond the fact that it was presumably performed by a mentally disturbed individual. As one anonymous commentator suggested:“This poor guy has gone insane after seeing the fruit of so much work downgraded to waste, simply because they should pay him more than what they pay for imports. The shepherd is a victim along with his sheep, but you cannot understand it.” 2 As this comment and others imply, a number of important issues are at stake here, namely the current undervaluation of the shepherd’s labor, the fair price of Sardinian sheep milk in a context in which its market price is formed in a global, competitive capitalist economy influenced by import-export transactions, and, last but not least, the relation between the shepherd and the sheep, both considered victims of a local system of practices difficult to explain to non-shepherds. Like Darnton’s cat massacre, the sheep massacre may be seen as a political act, a desperate