Trust Them?

One of the more irritating things about the previous consultations around the 2006 management planning was the insistence from the professional 'independent' facilitator (paid by SWT) that we should all trust one another. He played this tune several times. Seeing as the only reason that the process took place at all was that we had plenty of reason to mistrust SWT and their conservation allies, this came across as pretty unreasonable. If we agreed to trust them we might as well all go home and leave them to do what they wanted to do - which is what we all thought would happen anyway whatever the result of the process. And that proved to be correct.

As a child I can remember reading stories in school reading tutors and in comics which portrayed hill farmers as stirling compassionate heroes, utterly trustworthy in a specially countryman's manner and prepared to sacrifice the warm fireside seat to rescue a single sheep stranded on a precipice. Black Bob was the shepherd's dog in The Dandy comic, loyal and trustworthy too. This fiction is pretty hard to live up to but some slight vestige of it lingers on I suspect with many people and it's promoted by populist spin on BBC programmes and given support by the NFU.


Reality is something very different. Among the hundred or so sheep on the enclosure at Blacka a proportion inevitably develop problems and some die in rather unpleasant circumstances. How many walkers who make their way through the flocks consider this in relation to the sentimentality that is promoted on Easter cards and elsewhere? Does any vet ever get called out to one of these sheep? In practical terms how can a farmer who lives 20 miles away consider himself responsible for the care of these animals? The truth is that it is all down to crudely calculated economics. X number of beasts, £Y profit taking acount of a certain 'wastage'. And any system of land management of SSSIs that relies on farming itself bears responsibility for these failures.


Today a dead sheep was against the fence on the adjoining land. A quick check showed that the stream was dry and the tank on the top of Thistle Hill was again empty. I guess that this is viewed as just a normal state of affairs.