Recognition is dawning on humankind that, in following the tenets of industrialisation, in pursuing profit ends first and foremost, in looking for economies of scale, in pursuing material progress, in ignoring damaging dimensions of its activity while pursuing objectives of gain, it has produced harm to the planet and its process, elements, and nature.
Sheep, since the commencement (about ten thousand years ago) of them becoming domesticated creatures rather than wild creatures, are now, in largely having been bred to be ‘improved’ - towards human’s needs of them, and in being cared for, fed and treated for human’s aims, are not in the main having a very natural existence. In essence most sheep do not live a natural span, they eat somewhat unnatural, ‘doctored’ vegetation and sometimes also supplementary foods of a processed type, and where they shall be and go is by human ordination.
Now that notice has been arrived at that human endeavour has caused destruction and harm, initiatives towards achieving sustainability and biodiversity are to the forefront. Livestock farming, whose size and type of activity has essentially been driven by the wish to deliver food in the form of meat from animals, has come to be seen as having deleterious dimensions, in that it demands a lot of land to provide farm animal pasture, and because cows and sheep, principals in livestock farming, produce methane - which has a bad effect on the planet’s climate. The typical farming pasture field has come to be fairly monocultural, and lacking biodiversity.
There has been a sector which has been engaging in conservation grazing. Primarily this have been for reasons of maintaining habitats and/or to encourage them to be re-engendered, and for protecting wildlife and/or to encourage its presence. Among those in the conservation grazing forefront has been, and is, the National Trust.
It says this:
‘Grazing is often the most effective and natural way to maintain certain habitats such as grassland and heathland. It helps to keep areas open and ensuring a wider variety of plants and animals. We use grazing animals such as sheep and cattle on some of our nature reserves to continue a more traditional system carried out by rural people grazing their animals and living off the land. In the past, where people cleared land for cultivation and pasture their grazing animals helped replicate the effect on large herbivores which roamed the land in earlier times. Conservation grazing aims to continue this traditional system to help maintain habitats which have evolved over many centuries.’
And continues:
‘Light grazing on open, often scrubby landscapes is essential to ensure the survival of our rare and often threatened wildlife. There are no artificial inputs such as fertilisers and we use low numbers of animals with the timing and length of grazing being carefully managed …. Both over grazing and under grazing can be damaging to habitats, so it’s quite a skill to ensure effective and beneficial grazing regimes.’
There is a Rare Breeds Survival Trust paper by Christopher Price entitled ‘Rare Breed Briefing - Conservation Grazing’.
Under the heading ‘What is conservation grazing?’, Price says:
‘A variety of land managers carry out conservation grazing. Some conservation organisations own and manage their own flocks and herds for the sole purpose of grazing, some work in partnership with graziers who provide livestock. Conventional farmers may use livestock for conservation grazing under agri-environmental schemes.’
Price goes on to say, under the heading ‘Different species graze differently’,
‘Sheep are highly selective grazers, with small mouths able to pick the sweetest and most nutritious plant species from a sward. Their hooves are small and relatively light, compacting the ground. Evolved for a mountainous environment, they can suffer from foot problems and from the effects of flies in a lowland setting. However, appropriately managed, sheep can be useful animals, for example in heathland restoration where they can be summer grazed to reduce the expansion of scrub and promote heather growth, which they tend to eat only in winter.’
How the UK government was seeing England’s farming future was indicated on 30th November 2020 when its Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs [DEFRA] outlined a ‘path to sustainable farming’ to ‘come into force’ in the period 2021-2028 (and to be composed of these three: ‘Sustainable Farming Incentive’, ‘Local Nature Recovery’, ‘Landscape Recovery’). On 7th June 2021 DEFRA provided a Guidance document, to apply to England, entitled ‘Graze with livestock to maintain and improve habitats’, and the contents of which are:
‘Manage grazing to help wildlife
Create a conservation grazing management plan
How to manage livestock for habitat conservation
Conservation grazing by habitats
Monitor habitat condition
How to tell that conservation grazing is working.’
Under the first heading, it is explained that ‘traditional grazing …. is also known as conservation grazing’, and then said
‘Habitats suitable for conservation include:
grassland
heathland
wood pasture
coastal and floodplain grazing marsh, including areas with breeding and wintering wetland birds
fen
scrub and scrub mosaics
saltmarsh and sand dunes.’
Under all the other headings much vital, important, useful and detailed information is given.
Key are clearly: to have a conservation grazing management plan; careful evaluation of the habitat; choice of the right livestock; managing stock levels throughout the year.
A critical dimension is drawn attention to (under the heading ‘Manage your stock levels’) with these words: ‘Your habitat may not support the nutritional needs of livestock all year. You’ll need to remove livestock at these times or give habitats a rest period. You’ll need to identify other grazing land to move livestock to at these times.’ And later it is stated ‘You can provide supplementary feed in extreme weather conditions or for animal welfare reasons only. You should:
only use home-produced hay and silage
use the minimum amount of feed to meet livestock needs
use mineral blocks with low to moderate phosphorus content, or energy or protein concentrate blocks.’
Included in the Guidance document is information about which sorts of land sheep are suited for, on how sheep graze, upon what sheep graze.
The UK government Guidance document manifests clearly, as does other information of recent and contemporary times, that conservation grazing, to exist and to be instituted now and in the future, requires careful thought, planning, good management etc to operate. The natural way of ‘days of yore’ need careful and very-considered instituting. This is because, while rare breeds of sheep and other hardy types will have the old-style constitutions suited to the traditional, and natural, way, commercial and lowland types of sheep would not naturally be able to just handle the circumstance of rough pasture etc. It would need to be a process of some evolution to bring a commercial, modern-style farmed, kind of sheep ‘back to being natural’.
But maybe a sheep’s fundamental instinct of what is natural to itself is not too submerged and gone, and so will rise up and emerge rather more fast than could be imagined. Maybe a reversion to ‘doing what comes naturally’ could happen quite quickly.
For the sheep there are huge benefits of existence to a natural template. The sheep live their natural span. They can eat what they were conformed to eat, and what they like. They can be in the landscape that suits them. They can have greater choice and control over their day-to-day life. Simply, their quality of life is greater.
And maybe the sheep will be happy? In his book The Secret World of Farm Animals (2004), Jeffrey Masson, discusses if humans can know whether animals can be happy. He says: ‘I think we can know quite easily. An animal is happy if he or she can live in conformity to his or her own nature, using to the maximum those natural traits in a natural setting’.
A pivotal thing towards sheep having a natural style of existence, is for humans to eat less meat, to - in large number - adopt a plant-based diet. The benefit to the planet and to global society would be that then, naturally, there would be less sheep, and thus less methane emitted into the atmosphere.
In the adoption of the natural way, sheep can be the stewards and caretakers of, suitable to sheep, parts of our natural landscape, and we in turn will be their guardians and caretakers. Sheep farmers would gain their necessary income by society paying them for caring for the sheep, and so for their role in conservation and methane reduction.
The model for the future, for humans’ and sheep’s great benefit, is that all sheep on earth would be conservation grazers, living a way that is natural.
16th January 2022