Farmers have slammed the Welsh authorities’s inaction because the cost of assaults on livestock present that the state of affairs in Wales has gone from unhealthy to worse.
Farmer and well-known media persona Gareth Wyn Jones has criticised Cardiff’s inaction over what he says is “the slaughter of defenceless animals on the hills of Wales.”
A year ago the media was reporting that there were four times more attacks in Wales than in comparable parts of the UK.
Now new figures published by NFU Mutual show that, just in the last year in Wales, there has been a further doubling of attacks.
Elsewhere, in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, the increase in dog attacks on sheep was only 11%.
This means that over the last three years, while attacks on livestock in the rest of the UK were up a third, in Wales there was a staggering four-fold increase in dog attacks.
In his assessment of the figures, Mr Wyn Jones, who farms in North Wales, said that allowing the use of e-collars could help reduce the number of attacks.
Campaigners have frequently called on the Welsh government to overturn the ban on e-collars, which are used to train dogs to associate sheep with a one-off static pulse, in turn helping the dog become wary of approaching them.
The Welsh government banned the training of dogs with e-collars in 2010, and in 2018, Scotland decided against following suit.
“The slaughter of defenceless animals on the hills of Wales has got even worse, yet down in Cardiff the Welsh government is pretending there is no crisis,” Mr Wyn Jones said.
“We must do everything we can to save the dog’s life and the sheep’s life. Allowing e-collars to be used by properly trained people could help reduce the number of attacks.”
Founder of the Association of Responsible Dog Owners, Jamie Penrith, added that higher coaching of dogs was wanted and that the Welsh ban on protected aids comparable to e-collars wanted an pressing rethink.
Mr Penrith mentioned: “E-collar coaching creates a long-term aversion which stops the canine from ever desirous to strategy sheep – even when they’ve escaped from their properties or homeowners.
“The Welsh authorities’s response of simply encouraging homeowners to make use of leads is nice for coaching people, however utterly fails to coach the dogs.
“And it’s the dogs which have the tooth that are inflicting a lot struggling to Welsh sheep.”
