A grieving farmer got home from his father’s funeral to find heartless thieves had swooped on his fields and stolen 300 of his sheep.
Neil Fell suspects his 300-acre farm near the village of Brancepeth, County Durham, was targeted by the criminals because they knew he would be out at the family funeral.
The cruel gang stole a flock of 120 Welsh mountain ewes and 180 lambs, worth about £18,000, and Neil says they will now be butchered and their meat sold on the black market.
He was compensated by his insurer but said that if he had been able to rear the lambs to sell at market he could have made almost double that, estimating his total loss at around £35,000.
The theft is the latest example of a rising trend involving organised criminal gangs stealing livestock, with figures showing £2.7m worth of cattle, sheep and pigs were stolen last year – a four-year high.
Neil said: ‘Whoever took them knew the family would be away at the funeral.
‘Livestock theft has a major impact on a farmer. That is my profit for the year gone, so we will be at a loss this year.
‘I have a wife and two children to support. It has had a big financial impact and a big mental impact with the stress, I have to admit that, because you can’t pay that bill you used to be able to pay.’
A neighbour had seen a lorry in Neil’s field that day but assumed it was someone legitimately moving the flock.
The figures showing this year’s cost of livestock theft to farmers will be published in The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) annual rural crime report on August 1.
The insurer is funding the first national livestock theft prevention officer at the National Rural Crime Unit.
On social media, Jacquie Pennington said: ‘This makes me so angry. Poor farming family and who knows what possible cruelty the sheep have endured.
‘And to think they waited until everyone was at his father’s funeral. Despicable.’
Robert Storey said: ‘There just seems to be a tide of criminality sweeping this country. How on earth can you steal a flock of sheep and get away with it?’
Meanwhile a farmer from Devon has described the scene when he uncovered a brutal and barbaric attack on his herd of sheep.
The farmer, who keeps the animals on land near Exeter, does not want to be named for fear of reprisal attacks by the gang.
He and his wife discovered six of their sheep had been killed when they went to carry out a routine check on the flock at around 9pm on Monday, July 22.
The animals’ carcasses had been stolen but their heads had been cut off and left behind.
One of the sheep killed had a lamb which is just six weeks old and is now missing.
He said: ‘I just stood there, staring at it, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Obviously we’ve seen dead sheep before, we’ve seen what foxes can do or dog attacks but they ripped the animal apart.
‘Then my partner found a sheep’s head just thrown into the scrub on the opposite side of the field. It was then the penny dropped that the animal had been slaughtered.
‘You could see the bloody trail where they had dragged the carcasses to the gateway and removed them from the field.
‘They must have either shot the sheep or used some sort of weapon, possibly a crossbow to take the sheep down, because it would have been extremely difficult to catch these sheep in a field that size in order to do this.
‘We have a hard enough life as it is and the cost of farming in general is putting a lot of pressure on people and we simply do not need the worry of checking your livestock to find somebody to basically help themselves and not only that but brutally murder your animals and then stolen them.
‘These people are not only carrying around knives but are obviously capable of butchering an animal, but they’re also armed with the means to take these animals down.
‘Obviously we’re horrified and stunned that this kind of thing is going on and also quite worried about what would happen if these people were disturbed whilst they are carrying out what they do because in order to get these animals out of the field, we think that probably was at least two, three, possibly four of them.
He warned the sheep are not safe for human consumption because of medical treatment they were receiving.
PC Clarke Orchard, of the Rural Affairs Team at Devon and Cornwall Police said: ‘We understand that this incident will be concerning for people living in rural communities and urge farmers in the area to be extra vigilant over coming weeks.
‘We’re working closely with the farmer to investigate this devastating incident and are appealing to anyone who may have witnessed any suspicious activity in and around Exeter on Monday evening to please contact us on Crimestoppers or on 101, quoting crime reference 50240182871.
Hannah Binns, NFU Mutual rural affairs specialist, said: ‘Livestock theft itself is not a new phenomenon but in recent years has become a highly organised crime, often involving 50 or more sheep being taken in one raid.
‘These incidents can have a devastating impact on farming businesses, such as disrupting breeding lines and the stress of having to source and purchase new livestock. Livestock theft can also cause a huge amount of worry to farmers and their families about the welfare of stolen farm animals.’
In the past decade livestock insurers have seen a marked increase in claims of more than a dozen sheep being taken in one go. They say about 15 years ago those kinds of numbers would be a rarity but now they are regularly getting reports of 50 to 100 sheep being taken.
Rustlers are getting more skilled and organised, quickly loading sheep onto trailers and lorries late at night with the help of sheepdogs, which have also been stolen.
There has also been a rise in the illegal butchery of animals in fields.
Rather than having to move and hide the animals until they or their meat can be sold, thieves sometimes prefer to kill them where they are, butcher the carcasses and leave the remains.
Farm animals worth £3 million were stolen from farms in 2019. The figure decreased by 25 per cent to an estimated £2.3 million during 2020, during the pandemic and its months of lockdowns and travel restrictions.
Since then the cost of livestock theft has steadily risen, from £2.4 million in 2021 to £2.7 million in 2022. Less than one per cent of sheep rustling incidents end with a conviction.
Sheep-rustling leads to the animals or meat being sold on the black market.
The animals are often slaughtered in unregulated and unhygienic abattoirs that turn a blind eye to the lack of correct paperwork.
Black market meat can pose health risks as the sheep may be unfit for human consumption at the time they are stolen – because they can be on medication and not yet out of the ‘meat withdrawal period’, which is the time between the last dose of veterinary medicine and the slaughter of the animal.
To deter thieves, farmers are advised to vary the times of day they feed and check up on their stock, consider relocating stock to fields away from roads or housing them indoors if possible, and ensure stock are clearly marked and records are up to date.