A UK farmer has been left dumbfounded after receiving a complaint from animal welfare officials that his sheepdog was worrying sheep \u2013 only to discover the sheep involved were his own flock.<\/p>\n
Tom Trueman told Devon Live he was “baffled” when a letter from the RSPCA, bearing only an incident number arrived at his farm in Devon.<\/p>\n
On phoning the animal welfare charity, he was told the complaint was related to an incident in which his collie, Tilly, had been helping him round up sheep that had escaped onto a nearby road.<\/p>\n
“The only way that could have happened was if it was my sheep and my dog \u2013 which it was,” he said.<\/p>\n
Trueman had been moving sheep between fields when around 20 broke away.<\/p>\n
“I sent the dog off in hot pursuit. A car was coming around the corner, so I beckoned the car to stop and sent Tilly around to gather the sheep back up.”<\/p>\n
Two weeks later, he received a letter from the RSPCA.<\/p>\n
“When they told me my dog had been reported for sheep worrying, I couldn\u2019t believe it.”<\/p>\n
After explaining to the inspector, Trueman said the misunderstanding was quickly cleared up.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe just laughed and told me to tear the letter up.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trueman believed the compaint came from an unfamiliarity with farming rather than anyone acting maliciously.<\/p>\n
“I think it’s just ignorance. I don\u2019t think there was any bad intent, but it’s still baffling,” he told Devon Live.<\/p>\n
He thanked the RSPCA for how it handled the case.<\/p>\n
“At the end of the day, they were just doing their job. The woman I spoke to was nice as pie.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A UK farmer has been left dumbfounded after receiving a complaint from animal welfare officials that his sheepdog…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":473359,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[14934,42,43,40,38,41,39,1745],"class_list":["post-473358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-farming","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-uk-europe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=473358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/473359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}