Dog fights: the rise of rage in the countryside

Oh, the delights of the countryside. All that fresh air. The space. The rolling hills and the views. The peace and quiet. Apart from the stonings, that is.

Pity poor Christopher Pine. The 70 year-old farmer had to visit A&E in Somerset last weekend, bleeding profusely just above his left ear, after a dog-walker allegedly hurled a rock at his head.

Pine’s crime? Working the ground in a field in Creech St Michael, near Taunton, incurring the wrath of a man in his 30s walking a grey Staffordshire terrier, who apparently feared that Pine’s tractor was about to churn up the footpath that crossed the field.

According to Pine’s wife, Jane, the dog-walker (now the subject of a police enquiry) first lobbed dirt at the tractor. When Pine stopped to ask what was going on, “he was then told ‘don’t plough the footpath’, which, of course, he wasn’t.” Then, she says, the dog-walker “picked up a rock – and there are rocks there the size of your hand – and threw it at my husband’s head, then he ran off. If my husband had been looking two inches the other way he’d have had his eye out.”

Luckily doctors were able to stitch Pine up. But inevitably the anger and outrage, among his family and locals, is running high. Even celebrity farming ingenue Jeremy Clarkson has weighed in, demanding Avon and Somerset Police make catching the stone thrower their “number one priority”.

The countryside, it turns out, is afroth with confrontation between those who are there for pleasure, those who are there for work, and, most of all, between farmers and dog walkers. The problem is on the rise, exacerbated by an increase in dog ownership and a 43 per cent increase in walkers to the countryside. Throw recovery from the pandemic and the cost of living crisis into the mix, and nerves are frayed.

The share of UK households owning a pet dog jumped from 23 per cent to around 34 per cent, according to Statista, with 13 million dogs owned in 2020/21, up from 7.6 million in 2010/11, and some of those dogs are causing havoc in the countryside. According to the National Farmers’ Union, the cost of farm animals attacked by dogs rose by 10 per cent last year, with many of the dogs not trained. Of the 80 per cent of dogs walked off the lead, according to the NFU, 64 per cent don’t come back when called. Livestock are bearing the brunt.

At Hillhouse Farm in the Surrey Hills, farmer Ian Jones lost 17 rare breed Southdown sheep – 16 lambs and one ewe – in a dog attack last July. “In all,” he says, “around 32 animals were either attacked or injured. That’s £200 a lamb, £300 for the ewe, a vet’s bill of £2,700 and around £800 for the disposal of dead animals.”

His appeal brought forth a suspect, who admitted that her adopted dog had escaped and returned “wild and exhausted”. To his frustration, Surrey police responded [that] there wasn’t enough evidence and nothing to be done.

Jones – a dog owner himself – says he has found most dog walkers to be considerate, but worries some don’t understand the risk that even friendly animals can cause. “Even if your dog wouldn’t harm a fly, you don’t know what might happen. The two favourite pastimes for sheep are eating and dying, and being worried by a dog can cause a coronary, a foetus to abort, all sorts of problems.”

Nor is trouble flowing exclusively in one direction. In the Scottish Highlands, charity worker Georgina Thomas says she has been so harassed by a local shepherd she is looking to move from her rented cottage. “I want to move so I can walk my dog Bao, a lurcher, safely. I’ve been bullied [so badly] that I had a stroke in May 2021 and was hospitalised again recently for 10 days due to the extreme stress.”

She alleges that “the shepherd follows me on his quad bike when I walk her… I trained Bao not to chase sheep. She has never chased or harassed his sheep but [he] bullies me, shouting rude[ly], doing ‘stakeouts’ and following me. Many shepherds in this area hate anyone on their land.”

The potential for conflict has undoubtedly been increased by the pandemic, which prompted many locked-down couch potatoes to explore the great outdoors. Behind them came an army of town and city dwellers desperate to exchange concrete vistas for views of greener, more pleasant land.

According to the ONS, as Covid began to bite in 2020, people began to exercise far more. Not only that, but they began to take a far greater interest in nature too. In May 2020, “Thirty-six per cent of people said they were spending more time outside than before,” notes the ONS. “This rose to 46 per cent in July 2020 when restrictions lifted and people relied on the outdoors for leisure time and their holidays.”

Some of them chose to stay. In the summer of 2020, Rightmove data showed that enquiries from city residents about village homes rose by 126 per cent compared with the previous year.

New horizons brought new risks. “We have always had one significant dog attack each year,” says Hugh Broome, owner of a mixed farm in Dorking and co-host of the Farmers Weekly podcast. “Most of the time it’s when people are new to the area, not expecting sheep, or it’s new dog owners who can’t control their dogs.”

It is tempting to blame such attacks – as well the littering, plastic bags of dog poo hanging from branches, human poo in the bushes, hiker deviations destroying crops, and disposable BBQs sparking wildfires that landowners also complain about – on malice or militancy. Unlike Scotland, where the Land Reform Act in 2003 opened up access everywhere, the right to roam in England is governed by the Countryside and Rights of Way Act (2000), which essentially allows access only to upland heath and moor. In consequence, rambler groups lament that private ownership means just 8 per cent of English land, and 3 per cent of rivers, are publicly accessible.

The Act also sets a deadline of 2026 for walkers to appeal for disused paths, lost to time, to be restored as protected public rights of way. One result is a flurry of claims submitted. “One farmer had 18 claims for new rights of way on his land, with an estimated £30,000 per application to defend,” says Mark Bridgeman, former president at the Country Land and Business Association.

Yet most agree that such incidents are the exception, not the rule. The Ramblers Association has a wealth of stories of co-operation – of farmers advising walkers how to behave in fields of cattle, or with dogs, or flagging up new permissive access routes. Or, in one case, of a group of walkers presenting Mervyn Keeling, a farmer near Bath, with a certificate in honour of his efforts to clear part of the local Three Peaks Walk.

Indeed, increasingly farmers – with cafés, farm shops and B&Bs to rent as well as fields to sow – rely on incomers.

“If we didn’t have walkers and cyclists visiting the community shop, providing sustainable tourism, there wouldn’t be enough business,” says Chris Thomas, who volunteers at the Minstead Community Shop in the New Forest. “The locals and tourists are dependent on each other.”