The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Sheep => Topic started by: Creagan on April 22, 2015, 12:17:28 pm
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Was walking through an empty field today when my dog came across a rotting sheep carcass which had been recently hidden under a sheet of old corrugated iron. Absolutely yucky. Managed to get the dog away before she ate too much of it.
I was under the impression that you had to deal with fallen stock responsibly, either having it removed by the knackerman or dig a proper pit.
Should I be reporting this, and if so, who to?
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The carcass soul go to the knackerman, not left burned out buried. You should contact environmental health
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"Quickly ring the Feds" :-J
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Your local Trading Standards' Animal Health dept.
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You should by rights get them taken away. But at £20 a piece to be removed i'm sure not every single one does. I know around us the river seems to catch a few. I would also argue that on our hill land its less hygenic to move it a mile across the land than leave it as nature intended for scavengers to consume. We have also had them sat under sheets for a week waiting for the knacker man to call in. Honestly it gets my back right up when people take it upon themselves to report things like that. Fair enough if there is a large pile but not just for one. It might well be the farmer doesn't want to bring it near the yard while he is lambing, or a million other reasons.
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I know out on the fell they maybe missed but leaving them where people's dogs can access them is disgusting and fairly unpleasant for the dog owner too.
Leaving them to rot on the side of paths and in watercourses where everyone else can see them is foul. Not a nice thought for those whose water may come from these places either.
If someone left a dead horse or a cow rotting there would be a real outcry but for some reason sheep seem to be acceptable and some people are regular offenders.
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Is it possible that the body had been placed somewhere for ease of access by the knackerman - ie by a gate to a road etc. Sounds like it was covered over deliberately, maybe for collection later. You have to make your own judgement Creagan :)
If ppl insist on leaving bodies lying around then at least put them out of access of the public. Really it's just feeding the foxes and crows and increasing the fly population though, so you (and your neighbours) just end up spending more on Crovect and the like....
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Well the carcass is in a field, not exactly a public footpath, but it happens to be on my own boundary and as yet there is no fence, hence how the dog had access. It's not beside a gate or anything, and it's been lying long enough to rot and is in a number of pieces.
It's a small hollow in the ground with the remnants of a shed nearby, somebody has simply taken the quickest and easiest option to 'hide' the carcass, by dragging a sheet of tin over the top of it. The man actually owns a digger so I see no excuse.
Now that I think about it, I remember talking to someone who works for my neighbour, I was asking about foxes (I plan to keep geese, myself) and this guy said the foxes were a problem, you had to use loads of sheepdip on the bodies of dead sheep to hide the smell otherwise the foxes would get into them.
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It's not legal to bury them where I am (mid-Wales) - they have to go to fallen stock, or I believe the local hunt is ok too. There was a special permission given to bury them a couple of years ago after the big snow when so many died, but not now.
My own feeling is if it's in a remote spot it's pretty understandable to leave it, especially as people feed kites around here (with official blessing). But if it's bordering a neighbour or a footpath it should be collected. My neighbour had one drop just the other side of the fence from my chickens the other day. I hopped on the quad to let him know and he collected it a few hours later, all good.
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I'd just suggest doing a quick assessment of the costs vs benefits of dumping your neighbour in the smelly brown stuff.
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Clearly you have to use your own judgement, in general I would say phoning officials to get neighbours in trouble is a bad plan.
Is it an option for you to knock on the door and ask if he knew there was a dead sheep there and that it was starting to smell a bit? (Nicely). More likely to end up with a good response maybe? Or have neighbourly relations between you already deteriorated past this point?
Also I think you need to fence your dog in rather than expect the farmer to fence him out and keep off private land (location dependant)
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If a sheep isn't discovered and/or moved for several days it may well, depending on the time of year and how many foxes and badgers are in the area, have decomposed or been torn into pieces. Fallen stock collection can sometimes be unavoidably delayed because of the time and effort it can take to collect and transport the remains at this time of year, when a farmer may well be right in the middle of working a 16-hour day to keep his newborn lambs and calves alive.
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Ahh well yes, if its a neighbour then you'd best off starting with the polite method :).
Some people are very lazy though, a law is a law, and it doesn't really take much to plonk it in a barrel or something for the time being. People shouldn't be afraid of "dobing" other folk in if they are doing wrong, I think as a nation we have become rather spineless :(. (I will stop typing now before I start to rant!!)
Also, I'm sure trading standards can be smart about it so that your name is never brought into the frame. They could do a spot check on him, and if they go looking for bones they will probably find some if he makes a habit of leaving bodies to rot.
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Yes, good relations with your neighbour are important and yes, start there.
I take all the points about time, waiting for collection, busy lambing etc, etc but we could all use those.
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So, when people leave fallen stock to rot, what do they do about their flock records? Won't DEFRA be looking for a proper record of the death and correct disposal?
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I think they record them lost. I can't imagine the farmers who are running hundreds of sheep on the mountain are able to track down every last one. Maybe once all the ear tags have GPS transmitters...
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This really bugs me. We run a lot of sheep, on pretty remote and steep ground, and make every effort to bring everything dead back in if at all possible and have it collected properly, paying the fee each time, so I don't see why other people can't too.
Re the record keeping, as you do sometimes get either something in a ravine or similar that you either can't get to without endangering yourself or don't find for ages, or we also getting badgers chewing off ears complete with tags, I run two separate lists, an unkown deaths list, which records anything spotted dead somewhere where it is not safe it get to, or with the tags gone, and an 'AWOL' list, which is a list of tag numbers of sheep which have not appeared when I would expect them to, i.e. have not come in to be divided in to groups for tupping, have not come into the shed for lambing etc. These two lists are then cross referenced after the sheep has had another chance or two to reappear, and recorded in the flock register as 'black loss' which is perfectly acceptable to inspectors as long as the numbers you are recording in this way seem reasonable for your situation.
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it would decompose pretty quickly with this weather. I expect its covered to protect it from birds and nosy neighbours etc rather than being left to rot. I remember once coming home to find our ram had died of natural causes and the birds had disembowelled him pretty quickly in a short space of time.
I also remember working on a farm as a young girl and dead sheep would be piled high and stinking whilst waiting for collection.
our neighbours lost sheep during the lambing a few years back and the towny neighbours were going frantic as the bodies hadn't been moved fast enough.
keep your neighbours on side as you will need them one day. maybe offer assistance?
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Maybe once all the ear tags have GPS transmitters...
Please don't give DEFRA (or the EU for that matter) any ideas.... :o
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Well I suppose I will not bother saying anything, just wanted to judge how big an offence this was and as has been pointed out, it is worth getting on with the neighbours.
There is no way this carcass ended up where it is accidentally, nor is it awaiting collection. Plenty of sun-bleached bones lying around the field to attest to how my neighbour treats fallen stock.
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These two lists are then cross referenced after the sheep has had another chance or two to reappear, and recorded in the flock register as 'black loss' which is perfectly acceptable to inspectors as long as the numbers you are recording in this way seem reasonable for your situation.
Yes, that makes perfect sense, and frankly what more could you be expected to do? I was just wondering about those who leave dead 'uns around all over the place, and would thus have a far greater percentage unaccounted for.
My latest wondering is whether I can get away with recording names in my medicine record instead of tag numbers, as it would make my life easier. Different world eh? ;D
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I've had a ewe die in hot weather like we have now - She died sometime between a 7am check and 5pm....
She was well known as she was friendly and had split eyelids...
When I found her at 5pm, she was disembowled, mossing most organs, one leg gone and never seen again.
Knakerman took 4 days to arrive for just one sheep.... by that time their was head fleece and some bones... the birds had taken most everything else...
In hot weather you'd be surprised how fast one can go - even worse if you have to wait for a knakerman - I now normally cover with an old buidlersbag in - situ and weight it down with a pallet... stops the crows and foxed getting it, That said - they make a bloody good go of it....
You often have to wait a couple of days for collection, and worse still you may not find the body for a couple of days (lost a sheep aswell before - after a week of wondering where the bones and not much else were found in woods nextdoor - assuming a dog or fox took her and ate everything) - so knakerman collected bones and some fleece again.
OVerall under a tin sheet - sounds like something Id do... cover it up until you can move it....
Also - I HATe and avoid moving the carcase, especially in a batterd state, bits falling everywhere - best off left in situ, throw some LIME on it to stop things eating it and stop disease spreading.
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My latest wondering is whether I can get away with recording names in my medicine record instead of tag numbers, as it would make my life easier. Different world eh? ;D
If you keep a list in the front which shows corresponding names and tag numbers, I don't see why not!
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Our neighbouring sheep farmer seems to get away with ignoring fallen stock on a reasonably regular basis. As others have said its never a great idea to fall out with neighbours but he offers lots of opportunities to do this. When we bought our land it emerged that he had rented it from previous owner for many years. The local kids had hours of fun playing find the skull. There was no shortage of sheep remains littering the land. One of those occasions where farming gets a bad name lazy thoughtless sod
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My latest wondering is whether I can get away with recording names in my medicine record instead of tag numbers, as it would make my life easier. Different world eh? ;D
If you keep a list in the front which shows corresponding names and tag numbers, I don't see why not!
I do this! On my spreadsheet, I have list of which number is which name and then throughout the rest of the record, they are referred to by "Name".
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'Knakerman took 4 days to arrive for just one sheep.... by that time their was head fleece and some bones... the birds had taken most everything else...'
Makes me realise how fortunate we are to have the fallen stock company just up the road. Anything that dies here is popped into the trailer or Landie, and gone within hours. The staff are always helpful, and the cost minimal.
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its harder if its not the case like that - its exacerbated with low staff levels at weekends sadly!
Biggest problem is probabbly finding the fallen stock before its eaten, dead sheep seem to find overgrown ditches and nieghbours woods, somehow half way through a hedge etc, or that corner of the wet field you never really go into often.....
As long as you do it legit when you do find one, its all ok.
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We had a ewe die of old age, in hot and humid weather, and the knackerman got to us four days later. We 'd wrapped her in a double layer of feed sacks tied up very tight with binder twine and left her in a wheelbarrow in a cool shed with the door shut. When he came to collect her the sacks were buzzing with blowfiles ..... The lime pit seems a far more sensible solution in some instances.
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My old next door farmer was one of those that left rotting sheep in the fields. The trading standards were called and he got a mild ticking off and probably a stern warning, but at least did clean up his act.
I know there are heaps of dead lambs and sheep around at present: always is at lambing time. The deadstock collectors can't get round fast enough!
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Some of our local farmers move the ewe down near to an easier access point on their lanes and cover to await Northern Fallen Stock man to collect. This is always within two days. Depending on the weather and wild animals they can look a mess quick. If you think this is not the case then contact your local council for the correct people to report to in your area of the UK. I have a ewe died Sunday and she is covered and in my barn for collection today. I personally couldn't leave her away from the farm so putting up with the stink. I get a receipt and place it in my files and also record as died in my movement book.