A NIGHT or two ago, just up the road from my home in Northamptonshire three sheep rustlers stole eight live sheep from a field and slaughtered and butchered the carcasses right there. They took only the prime lamb leg and shoulder joints away with them.

Over the last few years this crime has slowly become more common. Organised gangs have taken over from individual chancers. Only one in a hundred are convicted.

Supermarkets and high street butchers charge between £15 and £30 per kilogram for prime lamb leg and shoulder joints. Market stalls, door to door sales and a few, less than scrupulous restaurants or cafes all provide a regular market for meat at about half or two thirds of butcher’s prices

Over £2.5m worth of livestock was stolen in 2018, the last year for which accurate figures are available. Since then the best estimates reckon the figures have increased by more than 10 per cent each year.

Some large, well organised raids can net the thieves thousands of pounds.

Last year one single raid saw 220 sheep stolen. This year the coronavirus has meant there were fewer drivers about at night who might spot and report the crime.

Farmers are using DNA tracing and coded fleece paint, but the latter is not much use if the sheep are butchered in the field and the fleece and skin left behind.

Now new electronic identification devices have been developed that is swallowed by the sheep and stays in the rumen — the first of its four stomachs. Some farmers are using internal chemical markers that also stay in the sheep’s rumen making it easier to prove the origins of slaughtered sheep.

The international trade in lamb meat has changed dramatically over the last few decades. Huge quantities of chilled New Zealand lamb used to arrive by refrigerated ship. It was always cheaper than home grown lamb.

Now New Zealand sells most of its lamb to China — don’t tell Mr Trump. The British market for New Zealand lamb is shrinking all the time.

Not all British butchers are scrupulously honest of course. Some sell mutton — meat sheep over two years old — as more expensive goat. There have been a number of cases of this particular scam. These butchers think that once their meat is in a good Jamaican goat curry punters won’t know the difference. How wrong they are.

More traditional poaching, particularly of deer, is also becoming a major and very professional criminal industry.

There are more than two million deer living in Britain. Numbers are rocketing due to more woodland cover, changed farms, set-aside subsidies, milder winters and the fact that deer have no predators except venison-eating humans.

This fast-growing population is made up of six main species. Only red and roe deer are native to Britain. Chinese water deer, muntjac, fallow and sika deer are all non-natives introduced either for food or so called sport. Some were imported to decorate rich folk’s private parkland.

All deer species are remarkable escapees. They can jump unfeasibly high fences and hedges. Escaped deer and their native cousins can do much damage to woodland ecosystems. In some areas over-browsing can threaten biodiversity.

As many as 50,000 deer are killed every year by night-time poachers and illegal blood-sports fanatics. Much night-time poaching is by lamping. Spotlights are aimed at the animal’s eyes to confuse and hypnotise them.

They stand still becoming an easy target for shotguns, illegal rifles or even silent crossbows. Animals shot by inexperienced stalkers or attacked by the hunter’s dogs can suffer painful lingering deaths. Lamping is a specific crime.

Game dealers are no longer rigorously controlled and there is a constant growing demand for venison, legal or otherwise. Poachers can always find unscrupulous buyers and dealers will in turn find many customers who won’t be to choosy about where the cheap venison came from.

Organised groups of two or three poachers will take a dozen deer in one night. They sell them to a game dealer or at the back doors of pubs for around £50 a carcass, it’s a profitable business.

Of course not all deer deaths are from poaching. A third of a million animals are culled from parkland and captive herds to reduce populations and overgrazing.

Some, but not too many, are killed by legal stalking. This is an expensive business. If you want to shoot a magnificent red stag it will cost a few thousand pounds.

Nearly a hundred thousand deer a year perish in road accidents. Just a few get their own back. About a dozen people died in deer-related road accidents last year.

Jenny, a friend of mine, was driving through her local forest at twilight. A roe deer sprinted across the road too quickly for her to avoid it. The impact threw the animal across the bonnet and through the windscreen.

The injured and terrified animal landed on Jenny’s lap kicking and biting before she managed to let it out the door. Jenny spent several months in hospital.

Illegal deer coursing is also on the increase. A pair of dogs, lurchers, greyhounds or saluki crosses are released to chase a deer. Huge amounts are bet on which dog will bring the terrified deer down first.

If the dead deer are not too badly bitten or torn about some may end up in the illegal venison trade. More often the bloody corpses are just left to rot in the field.

Finally let’s look at one more source of legal and illegal meat free from our countryside — the wild boar.

These stocky, powerful fur-covered pigs are among our biggest wild animals. An adult can stand up to 80cm (2ft 6in) at the shoulder. They normally weigh between 60–100kg (16 stone). Mature males can be much larger and have frightening tusks.

The delightful piglets are a lighter ginger-brown, with stripes on their coat for camouflage which gives them the popular nick-name humbugs after the old fashioned striped sweet.
Our boar population comes from captive animals that either escaped or were illegally released. There are now up to five thousand animals living wild. Many of them are in the Forest of Dean but wild boar can be found all over.

Once a common native species, boar were hunted to extinction in the Middle Ages. Then in the 1990s they popped up again.

Sightings of escaped or released farmed boar became relatively common. Many had been crossbred with domestic pigs on the farms. I welcome the return of any once-extinct native species, but not everyone agrees. Some opponents quote agricultural damage and traffic collisions as concerns.

Like deer, boar have no natural predators in Britain. That’s why some of us are campaigning for the reintroduction of our native lynx and native wolf.

Legal culls are used to control boar population growth and of course adults and piglets are both targets for hunters aiming to make their fortune in the illicit or legal wild bacon sarnie market.

It is quite legal to shoot wild boar in Britain. They are not protected under the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act but you must have the landowner’s permission to shoot. Of our estimated population of up to 5,000 boar about a quarter will be shot legally or otherwise each year.

So will it be under the counter breast of lamb, mutton dressed as… goat curry, haunch of venison, or boar bacon? The choice is yours.

Or, of course, you could become a vegan.