Westminster, stop interfering with farming – let science shepherd us
Iam an accidental duchess. Before my marriage, I was raised as a Welsh sheep farmer’s daughter. Our pride and joy was Sidney, our sheepdog, who was wonderful at rounding up our flock. But one time he attacked them. My father found him with blood on his mouth just before lambing. He had killed two ewes and their twins. These six sheep were our livelihood – and so my father shot our beloved Sidney.
For farmers, the predatory attacks of dogs and foxes are difficult to control. There are no easy answers. Yet far too often our politicians plunge feet first and make things far worse.
Take foxes. There are many people in the countryside who remain convinced that hunting was a balanced approach to keeping their numbers down – and at least as many others who just as firmly disagree.
The remarkable thing is that for all their sound and fury, politicians never commissioned research on whether snaring, shooting or hunting is the most humane way to keep fox numbers down. So I am delighted that 103 vets are today calling for scientific analysis into the way fox numbers are managed.
Snaring foxes is not without its problems. Non-target species such as badgers can be inadvertently trapped, and it is harrowing for wild animals to be constrained. Shooting is the most common way of killing foxes. The big problem is that because foxes are small, agile and often shot at distance, wounding rates can be high. Last month, The Daily Telegraph revealed that when the RSPB’S contractors wound foxes, the charity allows them to use dogs to pursue and kill them.
Modern thermal scopes have made shooting more popular and the vets report in their letter that in some areas, rural fox populations have fallen so much that they are “approaching extinction”.
A key issue with any method is how quick the animal dies. The official Burns Report said that with packs of dogs, the fox nearly always dies in just “a few seconds”.
Research could also study another alternative – which is never culling foxes. Yet ground-nesting waders such as curlew, lapwing and oystercatchers are bouncing back because fox numbers are being controlled. Black game are also surging. Ending fox control would also result in even more chickens and lambs meeting grisly ends.
Which leads me back to my childhood memories of my father regularly having to shoot dogs to protect his sheep.
Modern Wales has a huge problem with dog attacks. The Telegraph reported that Welsh sheep farmers suffer four times more attacks and shoot three times more dogs than their counterparts in the rest of the UK. Why is it such a huge problem in Wales? Last year, 100 farmers including Gareth Wyn Jones suggested it was because in 2010 the country banned the training of dogs with electronic collars. They pointed to the large volume of research that shows these collars are effective at making dogs wary of approaching sheep. That is important because dogs are forever escaping from their owners.
In Scotland, they recently raised the fine on owners for not keeping their dogs on leads to £40,000, and that has not solved the problem. Why? Because the biggest problem is training the dogs, not the owners.
The National Sheep Association says that bans on e-collar training are “utterly irresponsible”. So guess what the environment department in England has just promised to do? Ban them as well.
Hundreds of thousands of responsible owners use these devices to train their dogs because they do not want farmers shooting their pets. They believe that a short startle is far better than being shot. And for the record, the “shock” from e-collars is 3,000 times less powerful than that from some livestock fences.
Yet, the most shocking thing about this matter is that Thérèse Coffey, the Environment Secretary behind the latest attempt to ban e-collar training, used one on her own dog. She has some explaining to do.
Westminster has to stop ignoring farmers. We are custodians, practical people who have managed the balance of nature over the centuries. Both sides of my family have been farming the Welsh Marches since the time of Charles I. It is in our DNA.
We respect the role of all species, yet the armchair experts of London cannot stop interfering. They lack knowledge, they lack science – and they are creating impossible pressures on country people and animals.