I hope baaa-rmy story was a joke (From This Is Local London)

I hope baaa-rmy story was a joke

10:11am Friday 17th April 2009 in

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I READ it in a newspaper (not this one, I hasten to add) – so it must be true. Tesco, it is reported, have instructed Silver Fern Farms in New Zealand who supply the retail giant with lamb for the British table, that they must stop using sheepdogs to round up their sheep (the clue is in the name folks!), unless the dogs can be trained to be gentler, more considerate and more sheep user-friendly.

How you train a dog to send a written invitation to a flock of sheep to join him at the south-eastern corner of the 10,000 acre field, Tesco have not to date offered to explain. They have, it is alleged, suggested that it will be less stressful for the sheep if the shepherds – wait for it – “flail their arms, beat sticks or wave flags” to persuade the recalcitrant, grass chomping flock to toddle, unstressed, somewhere else.

Maybe we could export teams of Morris Dancers to assist the sheep farmers of New Zealand? Some would say that that would rather elegantly kill two birds with one stone.

Not I, however, dear reader. I spent a happy half hour, in Nottingham of all places, one evening last year watching a team of the jovial jingling jumpers strut their stuff for an appreciative audience outside a town centre hostelry. Great fun!

Back to the sheep! I know the supermarkets are trying to improve their act in every area, from phasing out battery chickens to introducing us to cholesterol-reducing spreads – but isn’t this directive just a tad on the going too far to plain barmy side?

Or is that baaa-rmy?

One of the shepherds is quoted, rather restrainedly in my opinion, as judging this edict from Tesco as ‘absolute baloney’.

Clearly, New Zealanders are less forthright than their Ozzie neighbours.

For those of us who used to love watching One Man and his Dog and enjoy the occasional forays into shepherding seen on another personal favourite Country File (long may the great John Craven present it too) – this is incomprehensible. I long to hear that, for once, the great British press have actually got it wrong.

Perhaps it was an April Fool? Please?

You know along the lines of offering counselling and compensation to prisoners who are traumatised by their incarceration when they are prevented from watching Hollyoaks or ordering Indian take-aways. Titter ye not. It will happen.