Tuesday 1 February 2011

Polluting


The domestic ruminants have presumably no more room on the pasture land to deposit their faeces. The sheep have broken out, looking for new places to pollute. Along with the highland cattle which contribute even more excrement to the grassland they have achieved saturation point, making everything there most appealing for the potential picnickers looking for a site in spring. A call should go out to all gardeners to bring along wheelbarrows. A small charge could be made going towards a fund to finance the removal of Blacka's barbed wire.

Is there a condition known as Oviphobia? Sheep are Ovis aries. Or is there a better word?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

How do you draw a distinction between the presence of dung from domestic livestock from that of other herbivores present on the moor such as deer and rabbits? Are they as equally 'polluting'? Are you talking about pollution in a purely superficial, visual sense as in you don't find it attractive to look at?

Neil said...

Steve, thanks for the comment and welcome.
You can hardly fail to see the industrial waste of the farming industry, concentrated within an enclosure as polluting. Anyone who has walked through fields on farmland must know what I'm talking about. There is no comparison with what you see (if you see it at all)of the faeces of deer or rabbits on wild open and unfarmed land. You normally have to look for evidence of deer. No need to look for that of cattle - you've probably already trodden in some anyway. It's partly numbers dictated by their industrial and commercial purpose and partly the fact they are kept in an enclosed space. But when they are let loose on the moor even in small numbers cattle deposit by choice all over the footpaths. It's part of the character of ungrazed and unmanaged land (as Blacka was for more than 50 years)that it's free from farm livestock and their dung. Thus the insistence on 'conservation grazing' everywhere by the farming and conservation industries is a threat to a certain kind of landscape character.