Spotlight on security as rustling on the increase
While farmers are used to checking on the welfare of their livestock, increasingly they are having to keep an eye on their security as well -with evidence revealed this week showing that rustling is on the increase.
According to figures released by the insurer, NFU Mutual, farm animals worth an estimated £2.5 million were stolen in the UK in 2018 – an 11 per cent rise in cost over two years.
And In Scotland it is estimated rustling has cost the country over £200,000 over the last two years.
“As the insurer of over three quarters of UK farmers, we are alarmed that thieves are stealing greater numbers of livestock,” said Martin Malone, NFU Mutual’s Manager for Scotland.
“A generation ago, rustling was typically an opportunist, small-scale local crime. Now it’s an organised crime with dozens or even hundreds of sheep worth thousands of pounds being taken in a single raid.”
Malone said that thieves were even using working sheepdogs - some of which had also been stolen - to round up hundreds of sheep which were then loaded into trailers or lorries
late at night. And he said that a recent spate of highly organised, largescale sheep thefts suggested that the rising trend had continued into 2019 - making livestock theft the most costly crime for the UK’S farming sector after agricultural vehicles and farm machinery.
Recent reports of animals being butchered in fields – a practice which undermined food safety as well as creating financial and emotional stress for farmers – were also a concern with the indusrers estimating that rural crime cost Scotland’s countryside £1.5m in 2017.
Police Inspector Alan Dron, National a member of the Scottish Partnership Against Rural Crime (SPARC), said that the remote and isolated nature ofmuchofscotland’ssheep
grazing land and hill farms meant thieves often operated unseen when they target flocks.
He said that SPARC had been keen to promote Tec Tracer, a product which covered wool and hair with millions of tiny microdots which could be used to trace stolen animals and deter thieves.
NFU Mutual advised farmers and butchers buying stock to check livestock records and ear tags carefully to ensure they were not buying stolen animals.
It also advises members of the public to be wary of buying meat from unusual sources because there may be health hazards as well as a risk they could be buying meat from rustled livestock.