The tale of Baa the woolly sheep and her mechanic

Wonderful little story.  I hope the Australians have not gone total bonkers like the Brits who ignore the real perils of shariah but clamp down hard on  good decent people who are non-Muslim.
Yup ... like you (and don't pretend you didn't think the same thing) on reading the first few sentences I too thought the lovely Baa Baa was kept for ulterior reasons but then was relieved to see she was a pet and not a lover.

Tim Stanley writing at the TelegraphUK:
...When a man’s best friend is his sheep, he’ll do anything to keep her. And rightly so.
About eleven years ago a mechanic called Vu Ho, of Springvale, Australia, decided to buy himself a pet. He made the unusual choice of a sheep, which he named Baa. Baa is now thought to be 16 and she and Vu are Best Friends Forever. He takes her around town in his BMW (he puts the backseat down so that she can fit in snuggly), she nuzzles him and he pets and feeds her. There’s no hint of romance; Baa's dignity has never been compromised. It’s all very wholesome and very Australian.

A couple of years ago a ranger told Vu that he had to get rid of Baa. Why? Because her presence in his house violated a Greater Dandenong council by-law stating that livestock cannot be kept on land of less than half a hectare without a permit. “Fine”, said Vu, “I’ll get a permit.” To his shock, he was refused one – because some bigots in city hall don’t regard a sheep as an acceptable pet. Discovering that state law took his side over the council, Vu decided to get legal and took his case to court. Incredibly – rather than turning a blind eye – the council decided to lawyer up too and take Vu on. Obstinacy squared off against obstinacy until the case went to the state’s highest courts at an estimated cost of $150,000. Refused legal aid, Vu defended himself and lost. But he’s still not giving up. “God is on my side,” he told reporters. And he’s almost certainly right.

For this story is an example of two things: a) the petty authoritarianism of government and b) the brilliant bloody-mindedness of some of its victims. Vu, by the way, is used to fighting tyrants. When the council chose to make an example of him it probably didn’t realise it was taking on one of Vietnam’s toughest dissidents. In the 1970s, Vu tried to start his own democratic revolution in communist Vietnam, by printing forged documents for the resistance out of a secret headquarters that he set up opposite Saigon police quarters. His cojones only got bigger over time. Vu built himself a gun that looked like a pen and taught himself how to make explosives. The commies caught him and threw him in prison where he was sentenced to four years in Hell. He convinced the guards to put him in charge of security (how?!) and slipped away into the jungle on New Year’s Eve. Vu ran through the jungle for two hours with a broken foot, took a truck to Saigon, laid low, fashioned a boat, carried the vessel along the coast to avoid the police and then sailed to Thailand. From there he gained refugee status in Australia, where he’s lived since 1981 as a quiet, unassuming mechanic with broken English. In short, Vu Ho is a freaking legend.

It’s extraordinary that, having fled a totalitarian nightmare for the supposedly free world, Vu now finds himself once again pitched against an Orwellian bureaucracy in his defence of his right to drive a sheep around in his BMW. But it’s probably his experience of authoritarianism in Vietnam that has made such a determined defender of freedom in Australia. He doesn’t care about the costs (“I risked my life to get here [to Australia] so it’s nothing to lose money.”) and he’s happy to go it alone (his brilliant 115 page submission was so good that the judge said, “I haven’t seen such well-directed research by an unrepresented litigant … for some time.”) Vu is a classic example of an individual who has spent his life resisting the prejudices and bullying of others. He’s a one-man Tea Party. The government will take his sheep from his cold dead hands….....