Sheep dip fears

NEARLY A fifth of Britain's sheep farmers may have suffered nerve damage from using highly toxic organophosphorous (OP) sheep dips, a report sponsored by the Government suggested yesterday.

omething unexpected always happens. Governments trust us to go on behaving in the same way and we don't. Ten years ago an elderly East German government, facing a sea of suddenly impatient bright young faces, gave up and let them surge over to the West, to the land of market forces. No one expected it: Communism itself crumbled.

Iexperienced the Scottish Borders with a toddler and husband number one in his camper van in 1981. The van blew up between Hawick and Edinburgh as Emily regurgitated baked beans. Sheep with claggy bottoms watched me clean the sticky orange child in a mountain stream - with water previously glimpsed only in expensive bottles. Then the jolly AA man arrived to take us home.

FRESH CONCERNS have been raised about the safety of human cloning with new findings that suggest Dolly the cloned sheep may be ageing faster than normal.

WANTED: AN effective leader with proven business ability, good planning skills and team-building expertise. Love of penguins and sheep an advantage.

CLONED ANIMALS have been found to suffer from serious genetic defects - a discovery that could deliver a fatal blow to hopes of ever using cloning for human reproduction.

THE JOKEY comments in relation to the photograph in Captain Moonlight's column (28 March) of the sheep aboard a scooter were in bad taste. The sheep is destined for slaughter at the religious festival of Eid-el-Kabir. Sheep are slaughtered in Halal fashion, that is, without prior stunning. However, at this festival any male, not someone trained in Halal slaughter methods, is entitled to kill a sheep. The unnecessary suffering of these animals is unthinkable. If both carotid arteries are severed with one stroke of the knife, the animal will lose brain responsiveness in approximately 14 seconds. With killing by untrained people the chances are that more than one cut with the blade will be required. Research studies at the University of Bristol have shown that a sheep will take five times longer to lose brain responsiveness at the hands of an untrained slaughterman, and if only the jugular vein is severed, it can take five minutes to lose brain responsiveness. This means, of course, pain and distress. Shame on you, Captain Moonlight!

On Friday, a posse of neighbours will assemble at Fforest Farm, near the Powys village of Hundred House, for an auction of this year's grass keep. The owner, George Barstow, will let almost all his 430 acres of grazing to the highest bidders, who will then have the right to run their sheep and cattle on his fields until the autumn. His only responsibilities will be to keep the fences in order and to maintain the grass by occasional topping and re-fertilising.

DOLLY the cloned sheep has had not just one little lamb, but three more, following her second pregnancy.

According to my map, there should be an Andy Goldsworthy sheep- fold about here. The stone walls on either side of Fellfoot Road make it difficult to see into the adjoining fields, but if I stand on that stepping stone emerging from the centre of the wall, what do I find? ... dry-stone walls enclosing a huge boulder.

Charles Arthur says we should give more support to our finsest scientific minds

IT WAS a sense of superiority I hadn't felt since doing a milk round. I came out of the pub in Smithfield market at 10 in the morning, looked at the rest of civilisation and thought, "I've already got drunk today and some of you lazy sods haven't even started work."

Accusing Cilla of anything approaching cruelty is like saying Rolf Harris pulls the ears off fluffy rabbits.