Deliberate Cruelty

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.   

Categories of deliberate cruelty range widely. 

There are those types which represent wrong, unkind, harmful, or else inadequate and insufficient, treatment of sheep during day-to-day sheep farming process and procedures. 

There are the types which represent putting, or leaving, sheep in such contexts as are recognised to be liable to render harm to the sheep, such as a war zone or an area of a natural disaster of some kind. Recent examples are Gaza and an area of Iceland. In Iceland, over 200 sheep had been ‘left to their fate by farmers after a volcanic eruption near the evacuated town of Grindavik (‘Rescuers in daring bid to save sheep trapped by Iceland volcano’, The Guardian, 16th January, 2024). All the sheep were rescued to safety ‘following two days without water and feed’ (Iceland Review website, 18th January 2024). 

Here is another type. It is portrayed in that dog owner who knows fully that dogs are natural predators of sheep, who completely appreciates that they should train their dogs to behave well, who is entirely aware that they need to constrain their dogs from going near sheep and worrying them, but who, nonetheless, lets their dogs worry sheep. 

Live exports of sheep is an activity type which has known potential - strong likelihood - to deliver circumstances of deliberate cruelty to sheep. Journeys are often long, space can be overcrowded, temperatures can be high. Recently, due to tensions in the Red Sea, M V Bahijah, a ship from Australia bound for Israel carrying around 14,000 sheep turned back, arriving in a summer heatwave and needing to wait off the coast of Australia before eventual disembarkation at port. The sheep were on the vessel for five and a half weeks in total (WAtoday, 13th February 2024).

A very direct type of deliberate cruelty to a sheep occurred in the UK in December of last year. At a village in Suffolk, ‘the sheep was killed by a club hammer and taken away with the hammer left on the footpath.’ (East Anglian Daily Times, 18th December 2023).  

Why does deliberate cruelty to sheep by a person or people group ever happen? Sheep are gentle, defenceless and non-aggressive creatures. They should only have the best and kindest of treatment.