[robert waddell]

dog owners  (when there dogs are caught worrying sheep )are like every body else when they are breaking the law all submissive and regretfull once they are out the field they could not give a flying stuff for you or you sheep
the whole point of shooting the the dog is removing the burden of proof on the sheep owners side
and just a cautionary note here  the way the gun licencing works  Sylvia's statement would be construed as her being an unfit person to hold a gun licence and in all probability would have her licence rescinded and the guns removed at her expense

[SallyintNorth]

It isn't just the dogs which cause visible actual harm.  A ewe stressed while carrying lambs can abort and/or suffer metabolic disturbances which could kill her.  An inexperienced ewe who has just lambed may become seperated from her lamb(s) and never get mothered up, leaving a lamb with compromised immunity who has to be hand-reared or fostered.

It's an education issue - most non-farming visitors won't have any idea that just being in a field, off lead, with the sheep can cause such problems.  I certainly didn't before I had my own flock.  I had very well trained dogs who would not even look at sheep (so long as I was with them...) and would come to heel the instant I called them, so I didn't realise that there could be any harm having them off lead walking near to me as I walked through a field of sheep.  In fact I used to be irritated by 'Keep Dogs on Leads or they'll be shot' signs as I felt I didn't want my well-behaved dogs tarred with that brush. 

Now I've had my own late-pregnancy ewes come down with pregnancy toxaemia just through being moved steadily in a flock on their own farm by their own collie dogs, and seen the very slight disturbances which can cause flighty or inexperienced ewes to leave their new-born lambs and fail to return to them, and I am hot with shame for my former ignorant behaviour.

[kanisha]

Well put Sally, I don't think people who haven't kept sheep realise how sensitive the ewes are to free running dogs and I would also put myself into that category of dog owners whos' dogs are under control off lead not that I ever would have walked them through a field of sheep as the dogs just weren't used to it. however since getting sheep It has highlighted the issue and my misunderstanding.

[VSS]

Well, on the bright side, the ewe is pretty perky this morning - she has jumped out of her pen in the shed and run off up the yard. We've left her out as he will probably be happier. Lets just keep our fingers crossed that the ears heal up and she holds on to the lambs.

[Sandy]

That sounds promising, if any of my dogs had a chance to do that I would be devistated and want to do everything I could to help.....I steer clear of sheep and stay in the forest although non have shown any signs of chasing sheep you never know. The farmer here has been known to shoot dogs even if they are running free, so we do not walk there although there used to be a dog loose in the area and they are always trouble!!!!  I see dogs like children and we are responsible!! Look forward to a post saying the Lambs have arrived!!

[doganjo]

As working Gundogs mine are trained to ignore sheep and sometimes on a shoot we are fairly close to them - but obviously that is with the farmer's permission, and the dogs are on whistle control.  However, today I was doing heelwork and obedience training along a country road, when I realised there were sheep in the adjacent field - I would have thought ewes in lamb by the looks of them.  They spotted me at the same time as I spotted them and they started to run, but stopped fairly soon after, as I immediately went to the other side of the lane with Bobby, and he wasn't interested. 

But any other dog might have just gone a little too close, even if they weren't actually in the field, or in any way aggressive to them - perhaps just curious.  Perhaps farmers should be aware of this too and not put sheep too close to a road where people may be walking dogs?  If any ewes aborted because of an incident like that I can't see how it would have been the dog or the owner's fault?  Thoughts?

[Sandy]

I do not go along the train line now, not sure if there are sheep or not but the farmer used to put warning signs up and I liked that....when you have dogs you need to know the walk well and it can be a suprise to see sheep sometimes...warning signs are great for me and the farmer!!

[Sylvia]

Annie, if sheep aborted just because they were startled I don't suppose there would be any left It's the sustained chasing and the terror this brings that does the damage. If only everyone instilled "LEAVE!!!" into their dogs it may save a lot of heartache and financial loss, though the awfulness of it is, I think, worse than the loss of money.

[SallyintNorth]

Sylvia, sheep do abort just because they are startled.  If they are early on and the egg is not yet firmly implanted, a scare (or bad weather, come to that) can cause implantation to fail. 

We had one day second cycle when 19 of our ewes in four different groups all came a-tupping.  That's nearly 10% of the total breeding ewes with tups at that time.  Something had happened, whether it was weather or a rampaging dog through the farm, to cause that many ewes to lose their embryos.

They can also come down with pregnancy toxaemia later on in pregnancy without a great deal in the way of stress if they are carrying twins or triplets, for instance.  It certainly doesn't take anything like as much as sustained chasing.  And that's the point, I think - those of us with a lot of sheep / lambing experience know that it really doesn't have to be bad dogs behaving badly, it can be what to the owner - and dog - appears to be nothing much and yet it can threaten a pregnancy, the life of the lamb(s) and even that of the ewe.

Annie, no-one can blame someone walking past on the road with a dog on a lead.  I'm not sure what I think about a dog being off lead on the road at other times of the year but in lambing country at lambing time, then from the farmer's perspective, it'd be better if the dog were on the lead, for sure.  We move some of our couples from the lambing pens to the fields along the lanes, I would be pretty upset to run into dogs off lead en route - although so long as the dog is leashed and controlled by the time we get up to it I suppose there'd be no harm done.

It isn't always possible to have all of ones lambing ewes in fields nowhere near roads or footpaths - or now of course, also 'open access land'.   In fact, what with the constraints of environmental schemes, two roads, the Roman Fort, Hadrian's Wall, two public footpaths and quite a few well-used but informal local routes, it is only about one-third of our fields (and considerably less than one-third of the acreage) in which we are allowed to graze sheep and which have neither footpath nor significant road frontage.

And we have to try to keep cattle off the tourist routes, especially cows with calves, in case of 'incident' - so our choices can be somewhat limited for safe, quiet places to lamb!

So what we do is try to make sure that the ewes who will be pregnant and lambing in those fields are used to walkers and other traffic; for the most part we keep our girls in the same fields from tupping to lambing, so they should be inured to the regular types of passers-by by the time the lambs are imminent.  But it does mean that many of them are in fields that people will bring dogs through, so we just have to keep our fingers crossed that all the dogs and owners behave sensibly - and that the ewes do, too!