Monday 7 March 2016

Very worrying.

From Farmer's Weekly:

A new campaign aims to raise awareness among dog owners of the devastating effects of livestock worrying, which is on the rise according to official figures.

The three-month campaign, led by Police Scotland in association with NFU Scotland, Scottish Land & Estates and other authorities, has been launched to coincide with the spring lambing period, when sheep are most at risk...

Dog attacks on livestock: The worrying facts

• More than 18,500 livestock were killed or injured in dog attacks in 2015.

• The South West has the highest number of livestock-worrying incidents in each of the past three years where attacks rose by almost 60% in 2015...


The simplest solution is to put cows and sheep in the same field. If the dogs go after the sheep, the cows will go after the dogs (or their owners).

Sorted.

6 comments:

Bayard said...

Wouldn't that be the worst of both worlds? Dead sheep and no-one to sue.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, fair point.

Bayard said...

"Sheep worrying" is a silly term and leads people to think "What's so bad about the sheep being worried? Aren't sheep always worried?". It should be called what it is, which is sheep-killing. If the sheep counter-attacked (which they do, sometimes, especially ewes defending their lambs) the walker wouldn't say that his dog was worried by a sheep, would he?It's like telling children not to accept sweets from a stranger when they don't know what a "stranger" is.

Richard T said...

Whilst not wishing to downplay the awfulness of dogs worrying farm animals, what is the true situation when in the second bullet, much is made of a 60% rise in incidents over each of the last 3 years. How many and in what context?

Chuck said...

Is it incidents, or the reporting of incidents, that are increasing?

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, it's a technical term. Go with the flow.

RT, those numbers seem very alarming, but ball park I would assume they are correct - there are tens of millions of sheep and cattle in this country, so if one or two percent are attacked by dogs every year, would not surprise me.

Ch, could be either, but whatever the figures are, my sympathies are with the farmers.