M/s Greer

Originally from: Richard Mawdsley
                        
Hello all,

The following letter appeared in the Daily Telegraph, yesterday (Tuesday), in which John Thorley, Chief Executive of the National Sheep Association, refutes Germaine Greer's statement. (Telegraph Saturday last and put on these sites.)

It will be interesting to see if the NFU can be bothered.

Richard.

British ewes don't need Greer's liberation politics.

Sir,

So Germaine Greer is now an expert on the British sheep industry. (Weekend, January 15th)? I don't think so.

The ear punch was binned at least ten years ago – largely at the insistence of sheep farmers. Second, "baby lamb" as a specialist meat is confined mostly to Mediterranean countries, where it is associated with a thriving sheep-milk sector for the production of yoghurts etc. Even the tiny number of flocks that are currently involved in the production of milk lambs are grown to normal size.

Third, Greer says that about "10 per cent of each years lambs, 4 million or so, will die of cold or starvation". This would suggest that we produce 40 million a year in Britain, more than twice the actual number born. That there are losses, no farmer could deny, but it is every sheep-farmers ambition to have none and Greer's 4 million figure is a flight of fancy.

The question of multiple births being "drug-induced" is another product of her imagination. It would be reasonable to say that roughly 95% of all mating and lambing among sheep is managed more or less as nature intended. Other topics she refers to are very much part of systems introduced to protect the health and welfare of each individual sheep.

The sheep has played a variety of roles since becoming man's first domesticated animal, as a producer of meat, milk, skins and wool. It is also now one of our most versatile and useful managers of the environment. We would be delighted to entertain the professor on our farm to explain some of the real facts of modern sheep life.

John Thorley
Chief executive,
National Sheep Association.
Malvern, Worcestershire.