This drawing, which is neither by Frederick Sandys nor of Abel (as suggested by the inscription), takes its inspiration from William Blake, and from George Richmond's pastoral engravings. Here, wolves and vultures prey upon a helpless flock of sheep as their feckless shepherd (wearing a wolf-skin, by a fire) dozes off. It may bear connection to Ruskin's 1851 pamphlet, an attack upon what he saw as the pretensions to priesthood of the High Church in ‘Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds’. In the same year Dyce published he published ‘Shepherds and Sheep’, a riposte to Ruskin, and in 1859 he painted The Good Shepherd, a Christ like figure.

Possibly an allegory of pre-historic life, before Christ the Good Shepherd.