Next time you’re in the British uplands, perhaps in one of our national parks, Dartmoor, say, or the Lake District, stop a while to watch a flock of sheep, and count how many of them are limping. You’ll find it’s a lot. Because keeping sheep year-round in our bleak uplands is an animal welfare issue on a huge scale, hidden in plain sight.
A popular piece of dark farming humour says that sheep “spend all their lives finding ways to die”
I’ve been in trouble with the sheep lobby on X for saying this. Especially boisterous in his criticism has been legendary upland farmer James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral, a truly wonderful book, after I stated (perhaps a little thoughtlessly) in a reply to someone or other that “there are no shepherds anymore! That’s the problem. The sheep are dumped on the hills all year round unsupervised, unprotected, and a good number of them consequently die of natural causes each year. A return to shepherding might be a good thing.”
The fact is, British sheep farming today is more akin to ranching than shepherding. “Rebanks’ own book, The Shepherd’s Life, is candid about this. Of his Herdwick flock on the Lake District fells, he writes: “In the eight weeks since I brought them here, I have not seen many of them… Our shepherding culture includes periods when the sheep graze the fells away from our supervision… so I am anxious to see them again, keen to check that they are alive and well.”
