Regulate, regulate, regulate...the European Union's psychotic obsession with legislating for absolutely bloody everything is provoking British farmers who don't want to be compelled
to electronically tag their sheep.
The regulations, to be introduced in January next year, mean each sheep must be fitted with an electronic ear tag. The move is designed to track all individual sheep in the wake of the foot and mouth epidemic of 2001. But Britain has more sheep than anywhere else in Europe, and farmers, already under pressure from falling prices and low profit margins, say it is not practicable or even necessary.
Apparently we have 30 million sheep in the country:
The huge costs associated with introducing the scheme - around £5,000-£6,000 for a machine to scan the tags, which themselves could cost between 50p and £1.50 each - would be enough to sink some farms.
It's likely this idiocy will be knocked back but the question should be asked, why was money and time spent on proposing the idea in the first place?
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I'm not so sure that this idiocy will be knocked back - here in France we have just been told by the Federation Nationale Ovine ( sheep farmers' union) that all lambs will have to have electronic tags as from 2010, and all breeding sheep by a date yet to be fixed. It sounds decidedly like a 'fait accompli'. We too are fed up with all the endless regulations - and yet are now faced with supplying all information of sheep movements to a national data base, and it seems quite likely that with electronic tags we will also be required to give details of all births/ deaths to the data base within 7 days. As if we haven't got enough to do already.Has a group been formed to represent the views of European sheep farmers ?
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