{"id":741530,"date":"2026-08-18T05:12:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T05:12:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/741530\/"},"modified":"2026-08-18T05:12:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T05:12:11","slug":"i-feel-guilty-creetown-farmer-whose-lamb-had-first-case-of-bluetongue-in-scotland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/741530\/","title":{"rendered":"‘I feel guilty’ – Creetown farmer whose lamb had first case of bluetongue in Scotland"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this year, farmer Fiona Johnson moved her family 350 miles north from a small village in Bedfordshire to the coast of south west Scotland, hoping to start afresh. She had no livestock, just “dogs and children”.<\/p>\n

Four months later, having purchased a small number of animals locally to rear for meat, Fiona’s fledgling farm in Creetown recorded the first ever case of bluetongue in Scotland.<\/p>\n

It was an already-poorly lamb, which Fiona said had not shown typical symptoms – it had been drooling, dropping food from its mouth and its legs were stiff, but not lame.<\/p>\n

Experts believe that midges infected with the potentially deadly disease were blown over the border from England, where there are currently 439 cases, external<\/a>. <\/p>\n

In Fiona’s eyes it was “really bad luck”.<\/p>\n

The rest of her animals – 27 lambs and five calves – are testing negative, but Scotland currently has four cases and the farming community is acutely aware the disease could spread further – just when farmers are preparing to sell animals for breeding.<\/p>\n

“For them, I feel guilty,” she said. “Farmers local to us are on a much larger scale, they have thousands of sheep up on the hill.<\/p>\n

“Although we’d done absolutely nothing wrong, I felt awful.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earlier this year, farmer Fiona Johnson moved her family 350 miles north from a small village in Bedfordshire…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":741531,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-741530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=741530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741530\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/741531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=741530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=741530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=741530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}