For dog worrying of sheep to be made to cease, the happening needs to be utterly recognised, to be addressed, and where responsibility for it lies to be owned. 

There are laws and regulations to achieve good welfare and treatment of animals. But if they are not enforced, at all or entirely, animals will not have the protection and good experience that the laws and regulations are aimed to bring. 

What distinguishes animal rights from animal welfare? In essence, animal welfare looks to see that animals are treated as well as possible in the context of their being creatures owned by humans and deployed for humans’ purpose. Animal welfare has been a concern for a long while - for two centuries. A cornerstone in relation to livestock welfare are the Five Freedoms (which emanated from the 1965 Brambell Report). The perspective of animal rights is that animals should not be subject to what humans want from them, but should have rights to certain things and with which humans must comply.

Attention to the welfare of sheep varies across the world. Moreover, human interpretation is somewhat fluid and amorphous on what constitutes animal welfare - and therefore what constitutes good animal welfare. Overall, the concept of animal welfare seems to have the embedded interpretation that the item is how people treat animals during process of making use of them. And the use of animals emanates from people having ownership of them. 

With warming weather will come ‘shearing time’. For their welfare, adult sheep need to be shorn annually. Additionally, some of the sheep will be being shorn for their fleece to be a product, wool. However, shearing, in itself and in its timing and context, has risks to a sheep’s well-being.  

City farms have usually been set up with worthy objectives. They will be looking to serve their local community, to give information and education about food and farming, to involve people, to help them, to give quality and improvement to their lives. They aim to be accessible. 

Sheep are not a joke. They are sentient, intelligent, animals. To portray sheep as comic figures is a frequent occurrence, and liable to encourage the misguided perception in humans that sheep do not need to be taken seriously. Particularly, products aimed for children often show sheep as ‘funny creatures’: this could lead to engendering in the children an attitude for life that sheep are not for valuing.

A lot of lambs are slaughtered because a lot of people want to eat lamb. Lambs for eating are killed early in life, and so they do not experience a full life.

A stereotypical image of lambs is of them gambolling happily in a field, with their mothers close by, looking after them and seeing that they are fed. This is lambs’ existence. But, for some the experience is short, or very short. This is because in the endeavour of sheep farming, ovines are seen as for use. 

Humans’ cruelty towards sheep can be unwitting or deliberate. Here, deliberate cruelty will be considered.

Deliberate cruelty represents humans knowing that their action or absence of action will bring suffering to sheep but doing it nonetheless. Despite awareness that sheep are live creatures and who feel - are sentient - the humans render the cruelty. 

Cruelty to sheep can be unwitting, in that the cruelty results from absence of questioning, comes from closed-mindedness, stems from ignorance. Or cruelty can be deliberate. Here, unwitting cruelty will be looked at.

In the activity of the sheep farming industry are displayed ‘we have always done it this way’ embedded attitudes. Change is necessary and overdue. 

Sheep farmers, as people working with living creatures requiring attention daily, have routines. The various elements comprising the ‘sheep farming year’ also have their place. And the year’s seasons impose what is to be done and how. So, there is both context and cause for the existence of an accepted approach in the activity of sheep farming. Additionally, farming of sheep is an endeavour usually happening in rural, quite remote, even isolated, places. Therefore, sheep farmers’ contact with a variety of people and viewpoints may not be huge. The general scene is provided for engendering attitudes in common to exist, and for leading to these to remain unaltered.