The week before last it was cows in the crosshairs, when Government announced plans to feed Britain’s cattle methane suppressants. But sheep are not exempt from green pressure. Some rewilding proponents would like so see the woolly creatures gone from the land altogether.
“Those campaigning to make our farming systems less productive, and who want to rid our hillsides of sheep, need to explain where the alternative food stocks will come from,” says Myfanwy Alexander, a writer and broadcaster from Montgomeryshire in Wales. She sides with sheep against the likes of George Monbiot, Ben Goldsmith and the Oxford-based charity Rewilding Britain.
Myfanwy Alexander has come to the defence of sheep in Spiked
[George] Monbiot blames sheep for preventing Britain’s uplands from developing a rich woodland habitat. He delicately ignores the fact that many of these areas are either peat bogs which are too soggy for oaks, or otherwise have layers of topsoil which are too thin for oaks. I grew up in the upland hills of Montgomeryshire. The only trees to be seen growing in the shallow soil there were thorns, twisted by the harsh winds. Sheep thrive in hill country not because they are ploughing through virgin forests like four-legged JCBs, but because they are able to survive on the thin pickings on offer.Ben Goldsmith may think we don’t need to produce sheep meat because he doesn’t particularly like it. But there is certainly demand from the wider public – why else does the U.K. import 40 million tonnes per year from Australia and New Zealand? And although sheep meat is no longer as much of a staple of the British diet as it was in the Victorian heyday of mutton stew, South Asian communities now also provide a very sizeable market.
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