@Pinchoftums
Whilst I agree in principle it is a weird world in which we live:
The main animals to protect appear to be grouse, pheasant, lambs, and cattle.
So people keep their dogs on leads (quite rightly) so that they don't kill them or harm them. However the main motivation for this is not to preserve life but to allow the farmer to shoot or kill them.
If it is a fox however it is perfectly reasonable to promote the use of chasing the bugger down with 20 dogs to deliberately rip it to shreds.
It's comments like this that make me realise how little understanding many people have about farming.
I'm just coming out of the other end of this years lambing time. We have around 900 breeding sheep, those 900 sheep will mostly live out their lives on our farm until they no longer have enough teeth to sufficiently feed themselves through winter, some will succumb to injury or illness or something else before that but not many.
It is a year round job keeping those sheep in good condition, feeding them, making winter feed for them, shearing them, treating them, gathering the, from the fell each time, choosing which sheep will go to which tup in the autumn etc. It doesn't just all happen by accident and then we happen upon the lambs at lambing time. It's a very labour intensive job.
Every year those 900 sheep provide us with approximately 1700 lambs. We have an outside system (we don't lamb anything inside, but we do bring weak and sickly lambs or sheep in if needed).
We work extremely hard to try and minimise losses, We get up as soon as it gets light and despite being up since 5.30am yesterday my DP was out until 11.30pm trying to find the fox/es that has picked off at least 10 lambs that we know of out of our 'twin' fields this year (where the sheep has two lambs to look after). Who knows how many newborn triplet or twin lambs that they have taken through the night without us knowing they even existed.
Despite all the work we put in we still lose around 100 -150 lambs every year during lambing time due to predation, lambing difficulties, exposure, disease etc and that's actually a really low number.
Small lambs that are only a few days or sometime weeks old are easy pickings for foxes, badgers and crows. Loose dogs chasing them tend to shake them like rag dolls and rip their noses, ears and tails of and take chunks out of their legs.
We are already exhausted and we are forced by the government to TB testing our 200 cattle this week too.
Every lamb counts, they are our main income for the year and they are the replacements for our own flock. We breed two different types of lamb from one breed of sheep. Around 250 of the original breed female lambs every year stay with us to eventually join the breeding flock of 900 when they are mature enough.
Around 650 of the female lambs that are cross bred or not ones we want to keep in our own flock from the pure bred sheep we sell in the Autumn as breeding sheep to other farmers. That is our main income for the year.
The male lambs will nearly all go for lamb chops when they are between 6 months and 12 months old. By this point the average person off the street are unlikely to recognise them as being 'lamb'.
Getting both the female and male lambs to the point of sale is again very labour intensive throughout the spring and summer.
So yes we do everything we can do to preserve life of vulnerable young lambs so that we can either sell / keep them as breeding stock (our main income) or sell them for meat when they are mature enough.
If something kills them when they are small defenceless lambs that directly impacts on the already tiny margins we are working to.
To say 'well they were just going to get killed anyway' is the equivalent of telling a cake maker that the wedding cake they have just finished decorating for someone else and you have just taken a huge slice out of 'was only going to get eaten anyway' and vastly misses the point.