Dog owners must bear greater burden

ENGLISH Heritage, apparently, wants us all to be nicer to people who visit the countryside. Farmers need to be more welcoming, make more of an effort to ensure people feel at home when they tramp across our land.

All I can say about that is that the official who drafted this advice clearly has had no experience of dealing with that hard core of the public who believe, for whatever reason, that they can behave exactly as they please when out and about in the countryside.

By way of an example I was looking round the fields at the weekend and checked on one where I have 140 ewes. For some reason they were all bunched up in one corner, so I decided to investigate.

And I saw I had visitors: a couple and their two children, plus a large labrador which was running around off the lead. It wasn’t making any move towards the sheep but its mere presence had been enough to make them nervous.

So I approached the couple and politely asked them if they were acquainted with the code. They asked me which code and I explained it was the code demanding that they keep their dog on a lead when it’s in a field where there are livestock.

Their response: “What’s the problem?”

I explained that the field contained my sheep which were roughly 10 days away from lambing and that their dog was clearly not under control because they had already called it back twice while we had been con– versing and it hadn’t take a blind bit of notice. And apparently it’s even this thuggish element of society that we are supposed to welcome with smiles and open arms, according to English Heritage.

Now if that dog had approached my sheep and started attacking them I should have been quite within my rights to fetch my gun and shoot it, at which point its owners would have run crying to the police and immediately taken to social media to denounce me as a murderer.

But the point is this. The dog has no idea it is doing wrong. If it attacks sheep it is because it has not been properly trained. And that is why I believe that in cases of sheep-worrying – a term which falls far short of conveying the horrific sight of disembowelled and mutilated animals then it is the owners who should bear the greater burden.

Not only with the fines which the law already prescribes in such cases. But with a life ban on keeping dogs.

We have a horrific problem with attacks on farm animals in this country. Far from being brought under control it has been increasing year on year. The damage is now costing insurers more than £1.3 million a year – a bill which is underwritten by all policy-holders, whether farmers or not.

The Government has made no appreciable attempt to do anything about this and the onus continues to be – as in the case of the latest message from English Heritage – on the farmers to make an effort to establish more harmonious relations between town and country.

The situation is clear. Before George Eustice takes a single further step towards achieving his rewilding dream (unless he’s having second thoughts) and thus encouraging more visits to the countryside the legislation covering attacks on farm animals must be strengthened and reinforced with real sanctions along the lines I have suggested.

If every farm in the country displayed a sign informing visitors that if their dog attacks livestock it will not only be destroyed but they will be banned from ever replacing it, it might make people stop, think and reflect.

And we could start to make real inroads into resolving a situation which continues to give hundreds of farmers sleepless nights at this time of the year.