Farmer injured by dog walker throwing a rock

[Plantstrees]

This is horrendous. A farmer going about his business ploughing a field, is attacked by a dog walker who thinks his rights trump those of the poor farmer trying to put food on our tables.

My understanding is that the farmer was ploughing the field that contained a footpath. He is quite within his rights to do so but the dog walker objected and tried to stop him.

I am really concerned that respect for other people and their property has disappeared in this country. Reports of dog walkers causing issues on farmland and to wildlife seems to be a daily occurence.

That is disgusting. Were you there? Where was this?

Horrific. Do you have a link?

Not the best newspaper. I saw it originally in Farmer's Weekly but that is subscription only:

www.express.co.uk/celebrity-news/1608926/Jeremy-Clarkson-begs-police-catch-dog-walker-attacked-farmer-Somerset-Twitter-news-latest

I don't really understand why people are allowed to just wander through farmers fields in England anyway. We don't have that where I live. Surely that's unsafe for the animals, I wouldn't trust people not to bring dogs in off lead/ leave gates open/ leave litter lying around.

They often do.

But if their dogs worry the animals the farmer is within his rights to shoot them (the dogs, not the owners)

England is a very small and crowded country. If we were not allowed to cross what was common land but is now private, we would have very little ability to walk off road at all.

Unfortunately during lockdown, a lot of people took up walking and/or got dogs who have little understanding of farming or respect for the Countryside Code

Awful. The poor farmer. I hope they catch the miscreant.

Farmers are allowed to plough and crop fields with rights of way on them, as long as the path is reinstated afterwards.

I love dogs, but some dog-owners are utterly appalling. Part of my job involves work with a farm and they have had appalling injuries to livestock from dogs. Only a couple of weeks ago a lamb had its two back legs ripped off by a dog and the owner was abusive to the farm manager when challenged. I don't know what's wrong with some people. 😢

Because farms make up a huge part of the countryside in the UK and normal, non land owning people would be unable to access vast swathes of it if that were the case.

I have a friend who owns a thousand acre arable farm here in Kent. Their family attitude has always been that it is only right that everyone should have access to the walks through the fields and woods they own (not just on the public rights of way) they ask that they respect the crop, keep to the track, take rubbish home and generally not act like an entitled dick.

In return for that they have to put up with people walking and even riding horses, driving bikes and off road vehicles across obviously cropped fields. People leaving a constant stream of litter (that we often go through collecting on our dog walks). Illegal use of dogs (lamping). Being threatened by dog walkers and other walkers when politely asked to keep to tracks (they’ve been threatened with a gun on two occasions). In an area where some fields back on to a particularly rough area, try have had more than one mattress dumped and set light to. Both adults and children from said area routinely goad combines and other vehicles by tuning in front of them etc etc etc. I don’t know how they manage to keep being so magnanimous in the face of the abuse they encounter tbh.

Oh yeah, lockdown was insane for them.

Increasingly, I think people are removed from agriculture (despite it literally being all around us) and are convinced that the countryside exists purely for recreation/looking pretty. I grew up in a village which has become “naice”. There’s at least 7 or 8 farming families who still live there and farm the surrounding land. Unfortunately, my family farm the field which is mostly popular with dog walkers. There was an illness in my family a couple of years ago, which led to things being scaled back and this particular field being untouched. I pleaded with my family to do something with the field so people didn’t forget that this was agricultural land and not their dog park…
Sure enough, a return to health, returning to prepare the field for use and the vitriol directed at my family has been disgusting. It’s mostly been on social media, people whipping each other into a frenzy, but it’s spilling over into real life. My family are really private, placid people who avoid all confrontation. I’m worried that they’ll give up farming rather than endure the very personal attacks. I can fully believe that this farmer was subject to a physical attack.

In England and Wales, people have a right to walk on highways, this includes footpaths, bridal ways, roads etc. Many of these existed long before farms did and have been used for centuries.
Unfortunately there are always some idiots who can't behave, just look at the standard of driving here.

I hope they catch him, though I'm
not sure how. He could have killed the farmer doing that. What a vile person. 😡

We are farmers and people really don't care about farmers fields, I genuinely don't think they make the link of it being an actual income for the farmer, let alone the source of half the stuff in the supermarket. We have fields that have no footpaths and yet people use them as short cuts - we generally don't mind this if people are respectful, keep to the edge, or stick to single file, but we have a few fields where the 'footpath' that has been made by walkers is the width of two tractors now because they wander down it in groups all side by side and every year it gets wider and wider (and the area the crops actually grows gets smaller and smaller). Yesterday we had someone park their car right outside a field gate and wander off for a long dog walk - we couldn't get the machinery we needed to into the field. But if you say anything, all you get is abuse. Lockdown was awful, my husband now tells me to stop challenging people for my safety

Yeah, we don't have that here, either, the farmer's land is the farmer's property and no one else is entitled to access it.

I've even met people walking NEXT to a footpath on our field of young plants instead, when challenged they've said the footpath was muddy(!!) - don't walk in the countryside if you don't want to get muddy?

Alot of people, particularly those who only discovered the countryside during covid, feel their leisure has priority over others earning a living.

They really need to revive the Countryside Code. The government should have done a big campaign during lockdown because this behaviour has become embedded.

Let's hope they all give their badly trained dogs soon and we can get back to normal

I would never trample over a farmer's field. Mainly because the Countryside Code was drummed into me as a kid. The poor farmer going about his business & some oik thinks hurling a rock is ok? Would they do that in the town / city? Would they buggery!

Increasingly, I think people are removed from agriculture (despite it literally being all around us) and are convinced that the countryside exists purely for recreation/looking pretty.

I think this is very true. But...

While I don't in any way condone the anti-social behaviour of large numbers of people on agricultural land (those people behave anti-socially everywhere else, too), I can sort of understand this view of farmland. I might be misremembering my youth through a golden-tinged filter but I'm fairly sure a much larger proportion of fields obviously had either crops or livestock in them. When you look at many rural areas now there are miles & miles of fields that only contain grass, much of it grown to make silage to feed cows locked up in concrete dairy sheds. It's pretty hard for someone who doesn't work on farms to understand what's wrong with treating that land as a leisure facility.

We don't have public information films about the country code and all that sort of stuff we had in the nineteen-seventies. Many people just don't know what the purpose of agricultural land is, and they have spent most or all of their lives being told nothing is important apart from showbiz/celebrity and whatever other cack passes for news in the (mis)information age, so there's no reason at all to expect them to know. If they see a piece of green space, how are they supposed to recognise the difference between a park and a field? There is a continuous, unrelenting drive to make people more ignorant, so it's hardly suprising that people are becoming just that.

I’m not sure that people actually realise that it’s linked to earning a living. A field used for grazing or mowing or another low intensity purpose will just look like pretty, open meadows to them for large parts of the year. Part of the attack on my family was claims that their field was not agricultural land - it was wildflower meadow. Implying my family were breaking rules by tending it… the way that they have for 4 generations.

Literally crossed posts with FatOaf! Yep, they see a lovely, pretty green field and don’t see the fencing/weed control/muck spreading/topping etc etc that goes into it year round. And I can understand that.
What saddened me was the very quick leap to reaching a very opposite and untrue conclusion - that it was some kind of public realm that shouldn’t be used for farming.

My ILs are a farming family and have similar experiences - for some reason the people living in the local village hate them. They also have holiday cottages attached and so many guests are clueless and/or don't care. DH and I were walking the dog a few months ago and saw one of the guests out on a walk with his off-lead dog. We politely said to him "oh there's a shoot going on so you need to keep the dog on a lead". Guest said "it's fine" and carried on with his off-lead dog.

I expect he would have been first to complain has his dog been shot for running amok during the shoot...

As a country bumpkin, I often feel city folk don't understand our way of life at all (and even look down on us for it).

I strongly doubt the Express gives a hoot, apart from the shock factor.
Wasn't it this right-wing nut-rag that criticised the Europeans a while ago for not smacking their kids?

How terrible for the farmer. Hope all is well now. I am amazed and delighted that bridle paths across fields are open to visitors. It was a highlight of our holiday however, being farming people, we certainly repected the farmers and loved noting UK practices etc.