"The owner and the dog had disappeared by the time we got there – there was nothing we could do." Farmer Isobel Connell recently lost eight lambs after a dog chased and attacked them while its owner looked on. Her farm in the Chiltern Hills near Henley-on-Thames has been subjected to even worse attacks - 10 years ago 68 lambs and 19 ewes were killed by two loose Labradors.
Yes, labradors. Despite what some owners believe, your fat sleepy labrador is just as likely to worry likestock, given the opportunity, as the chav down the road's semi-feral xl bully. All dogs descend from wolves after all.
"We have our phone number on all the gates and somebody rang to tell us what had happened," Isobel says. She was told there were a "lot of lambs dotted around covered in blood with a lot of wool loose". She rushed to the scene, but by then it was too late, with the lambs left either dead, dying, or heavily injured. "The dog owner was nowhere to be seen, they'd scarpered," she says. "It's harrowing, and it gets you really, really down."
Get yourself a gun and protect them yourself - you'll never be able to rely on dog owners to be responsible.
No comments:
Post a Comment