Southampton Commoner💙

Dog walkers who did not pick up after their pets have cost a New Forest farmer 18 of the 38 calves his herd was carrying. Tom Gould is a commoner, keeping cattle on the Forest under rights first written down 800 years ago. He scanned 38 cows in calf in March, turned them out onto Wilverley and Longslade for the summer, and when they came back in only half of them calved. Blood tests found every animal in the herd had been exposed to Neospora caninum. Some of the calves that did come were deformed. Neospora lives in a dog. It comes out in the faeces, sits in the grass, and gets eaten by a cow up to 6 months later. No vaccine exists and no treatment. An infected cow is infected for life, and she passes it down the female line to her heifer calves, so the loss runs past one year's calves and into the bloodline. Gould could not buy his way out either: New Forest stock has to be double tested for TB before it comes in, so a replacement heifer takes a season to get through the gate. The New Forest Dog Owners Group, 1,200 members, said it was the foxes. The Moredun Institute, which has been studying the parasite for 30 years, says the dog is the definitive host and it has found no link with foxes. The dog that carries it usually shows nothing. The owner who left it in the grass will never know he did, and he will walk the same path next Saturday with the same dog and the same bag in his pocket. That is the quiet half of the damage. Farm animals worth £1.95 million were injured or killed by dogs in Britain in 2025, up 10% on the year. NFU Mutual asked 1,407 dog owners about it in February. 57% let the dog off the lead in the countryside. 1 in 10 said it has no recall at all. 44% said it comes back some of the time. 72% do nothing to stop it chasing. Nearly two-thirds do not believe it could harm an animal. The law moved in March. Unlimited fines in place of the £1,000 cap that had stood since 1953, and the police can now swab a dog, seize it, and come through your door to do it. Not one person in any of this set out to hurt an animal, and 18 calves are dead anyway. Pick the mess up and put the lead on. It is the only request in British farming that costs nothing.

They told you to eat salmon for the omega-3, then they fed the salmon rapeseed. The whole case for oily fish is the long-chain omega-3, the fat your brain and retina are built from, and the one fat in this whole debate both sides agree you need more of. Farmed salmon does not make it. Nothing makes it. The fish gets it from eating smaller fish, which got it from algae. Take the smaller fish out of the feed and the salmon is a pink shape. So the industry took the smaller fish out of the feed. Fish oil is expensive and rapeseed oil is not. Between 2006 and 2015 the feed in Scottish salmon farms swung from fish oil to vegetable oil, and the omega-3 in the fillet on the shelf halved. Same fish, same price, half the point. A portion of farmed salmon now carries half the fat you were sent to buy it for, and a load of linoleic acid the wild fish never had, because a salmon has no rumen and its fat is a printout of the feed bag. The label still says rich in omega-3. Rich against what, it does not say. The pattern holds across the whole shelf. Name a food for one virtue, industrialise it, quietly swap the virtue out for a cheaper oil, keep the name. The salmon did nothing wrong. It ate what it was given. So did you.

The obvious answer to losing our foreign shearers is to simply train our own. Britain already does. Training was never the problem, and here is what actually is. The country has fourteen million breeding ewes and about three months to shear them, because the fleece has to come off in a short warm window or the animal suffers. A mountain of work crammed into one season, then nothing for nine months. So think like someone weighing up the trade. You spend years mastering one of the hardest physical skills in farming, shearing hundreds a day with calm hands and no harm to the animal, and the reward is twelve brutal weeks in summer and three quarters of a year with no work and no money. Nobody builds a life on that. So they don't, and who could blame them. The shearers who fly in have solved the one problem Britain cannot. A top shearer works four countries a year, New Zealand, America, Britain, Australia, three months in each, chasing the season round the planet until twelve weeks becomes fifty. That is what makes it a career instead of a summer job, and no single country can recreate it, because no single country has more than one season. There used to be British gangs on this circuit. Contractors who travelled, who trained the next lot, who knew every shed in the dale. That world thinned as the wool stopped paying and the young went to jobs that ran all year, and the gap was filled by the shearers who fly in, who now teach the British newcomers coming up, because the knowledge had nowhere else to live. Cut them off and you do not force Britain to train its own. You remove the last people still doing the teaching. And this is what makes it so hard to stomach. Seventy-five people, in for twelve weeks, gone the day the job is done, costing the taxpayer nothing and leaving the flock shorn. If any arrival on earth is the useful kind, it is this one. A government serious about who comes and goes would fling the door open to exactly these people and spend its energy on the arrivals it genuinely cannot account for. It has done the precise reverse. A hard No for the seventy-five it could see, needed and time-limit, while the numbers it cannot explain carry on untouched. They looked at a skills chain held together by seasonal workers and decided the workers were the problem. They were the only reason it still existed.