A gang of sheep rustlers is stalking our county

Though autumn is happily still some way off, we’ve already reached that stage in the shepherd’s calendar when full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn. In fact they now look bigger than their mothers. The easiest way of differentiating the ewes from the lambs is that the latter still have their fleeces while the former are shorn and look thoroughly careworn and knackered from having to feed their demanding and needy adolescents long after it’s strictly necessary.

What’s rather spoiling my nature notes at the moment, though, is the nagging fear that next time I venture out into the fields on my morning walk with the dog, our pastoral idyll will have been reduced to a bloody shambles of discarded entrails and severed heads. A gang of professional sheep rustlers has been stalking our county — and all the local farmers are worried that we’re going to be hit next.

I’ve spoken to a couple of the victims, who prefer to remain anonymous. John, a Warwickshire farmer whose flocks have been attacked on four separate occasions, had a particularly horrible experience in April when 18 of his ewes and one lamb were slaughtered in the fields where they stood. ‘A lot of the lambs were still suckling and I found them the next morning bleating next to what was left of their mothers. It was very upsetting.’

Usually the gangs strike when there’s a full moon. And they’re clearly very well organised. ‘They’re rife round us,’ says another victim, Jason, who recently had 19 lambs taken in one night. ‘It’s not easy rounding up 150 sheep in a 20-acre field but that’s what they did — I reckon they must have had a dog. They ran them into a corner, pulled them up with wire on to the branch of a tree, cut their throats and hung them up and dressed them on the spot, took away the carcasses and left the waste.