JAMES DELINGPOLE
A gang of sheep rustlers
is stalking our county
‘I’m a slaughterman myself and I can tell
these people know what they’re doing,’
says Jason. ‘They do as good a job as you’d
find in an abattoir.’
So far in the Midlands this year, more
than 100 sheep have been butchered in the
fields. ‘They’re definitely stolen to order,’
says Jason. ‘When you’re talking 100 lambs,
most butchers couldn’t sell that much in two
or three months. These are going straight to
someone’s fridge.’
This is rustling on an almost unprece-
dented scale. Last year, farm animals worth£2.5 million were stolen, according to the
insurer NFU Mutual — part of a surge in
rural crime which has seen it reach a seven-
year high and which last year cost the UK
£50 million. ‘In a single generation, country
people have seen rural crime change from
the opportunist theft of a single lamb to bra-
zen heists of tractors worth over £100,
and rustlers stealing hundreds of sheep,’
NFU Mutual’s Tim Price told the Guardian.
Who is responsible for this carnage?
There have been few arrests, still fewer
convictions, but the police do have their
suspicions. Last year, nearly 10,000 sheep
were stolen by livestock rustlers in Eng-land and Wales but this only resulted in one
charge by the police. ‘These are horrific
crimes being carried out by an organised
gang of criminals who appear to have an
operation with an outlet to sell this illegally
slaughtered and stolen meat,’ said a spokes-
man for NFU.
The people committing these crimes
don’t seem much troubled by the prospect
of being caught. ‘We found all sorts of clues
they’d left behind,’ says John. ‘Fag ends, fag
packets, energy drinks. They clearly took
their time and were in no rush. Well it’s not
like anyone was going to stop them, was it?
Maybe six men and a dog in the dead of
night, all armed with sharp knives...’
When I lived in London, someone was
shot right on my doorstep, while anoth-
er was given one of those so-called ‘life-
changing injuries’ — shot in the balls, I think
— having had the temerity to wish a friend-
ly good day to a passing gangster. But you
accept that sort of thing in the Big Smoke
— ‘part and parcel of living in the big city’,
as some pillock once said. They become one-
upmanship anecdotes to demonstrate just
how edgy and real a thug life you are living
in your £1 million-plus mansion.
In the country, though, these crimes
feel more invasive, upsetting and personal.
You move to the sticks to escape all that
ugly stuff, to retreat to a better, more civi-
lised world where it’s still safe to leave your
doors unlocked and no one’s going to shoot
you, except by accident when they pepper
you with shot and then apologise profusely
afterwards with a case of decent claret.
The other day, when I went for a swim
in one of the lakes on the estate, I particu-
larly resented being warned off by the water
bailiff — not because it annoys the anglers,
though of course it does, but because an
eastern European gang had put out nets
to catch the carp and there was a danger
I might get caught in them and drown.
Whatever rules these livestock rustlers
play by, it’s certainly not cricket. Maybe
it’s time to revive the old country tradition
of man traps.T
hough 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 differenti-
ating the ewes from the lambs is that the lat-
ter 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 pasto-
ral 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.’
Even though it’s an unpleasant thing to
find — just the heads, still attached to the
fleece, and the guts, all swarming with flies
— the gangs are impressively professional.
You move to the sticks to escape
all th at ugly stuf f, to ret reat to
a better, more civilised world