[SallyintNorth]

Shep, I've only just seen this.    to you for having to go through such a traumatic experience.  And  again for taking the time and trouble to get the sheep sorted.

I have to believe that the owner was unaware of what the dog had done - maybe, like one of the posters on here, didn't know there were sheep on the moor, dog wasn't about for a bit and then was... sounds like there would have been blood on the dog, but what could you do?  It's a big moor to go searching...   So I do hope the owner didn't know about this specific sheep and hopefully will have learned a lesson from the state of the dog on its return.

Plantoid's story is horrific but not terribly uncommon.  A vet friend of mine always says, "One's a pet, two's a pack."  They'll get up to things together neither would on their own.  A policeman in a sheep-farming area once, many years ago, told me that the majority of sheep attacks were carried out by farmers' dogs.  They do things to sheep when their owner isn't about, he said...  These days, I think, traffic is so much more dangerous that most dogs, farm or otherwise, are safely contained most of the time and rarely wandering unattended.

[Castle Farm]

And people wonder why farmers are against this 'free to roam' policy.

[Old Shep]

Thank you everyone for your supportive comments  Unfortunately by the wounds (won't go into details) the dog was missing for a while  - not just popped off and then back to the owner. Or may be the dog was a stray?  It was a big dog anyway, and yes would have had blood on it.  We'll probably never know the whole story 

[sabrina]

I have had dog owners tell me that their dog means no harm only playing with my pregnant mares when I was breeding the ponies. Hence electric fencing everywhere.

[Lesley Silvester]

Like the dog owner telling me his dog didn't mean any harm after it bit my son.