The Missing Video

We no longer live in the era of candles and schooners.

▪️Infrared cameras are in hunter hands all over the world.

▪️Low-light Closed Circuit TV is ubiquitous and guards corals, pens, barns, and pastures the world over.

▪️Inexpensive, high-quality game cameras that take video, as well as still images, are in every sporting goods store that sells ammunition or fishing tackle.

▪️Everyone — literally everyone — has a video camera in their pocket these days.

 

And yet. 

And yet there is still no video of fox killing sheep.

I’m not saying it’s never happened — just that we have more video evidence for Big Foot, the Yeti, and the Loch Ness Monster than we do of fox killing sheep.

Which is not to say sheep are actually in the business of living.  

Sheep are famously stupid animals that will flip themselves into a ditch and drown in 8 inches of water.

Ewes are crappy mothers, often wandering away from their own young, leaving them to starve and freeze to death.  

And the sheep industry is pretty callous too, providing little or no weather protection and often running too many sheep on too little forage, resulting in poor-quality ewes giving birth to low birth-weight lambs.

Suffice it to say that even when there are no predators about (other than pet dogs), such as Tasmania or any number of the British and Scottish Isles, lamb neo-natal mortality is high, ranging from 10 to over 25 percent.

Fox have no trouble finding dead lambs free for the taking. 

And then there’s the afterbirth, the sheep testicles that fall off after banding, and the milk-rich sheep shit.  All of that makes for fine fox food and a good reason for fox to be very interested in sheep at lambing time.

And yet.

And yet there is still no video of fox killing sheep.

I’m not saying it’s never happened, only that if the video existed, it would be played on an endless loop on British TV by the Countryside Alliance.

Everyone KNOWS this last bit is true.

And yet.

And yet there is still no video of fox killing sheep.

Of couse, people believe in a LOT of things absent evidence.  

Look at religion and look at the Kennel Clubs.

Look at the folks who still believe in trickle down economics.

But me?  I live in a reality-based community.

Which is not to say it’s never happened.

Just that there’s no video, and you would not think that video would be a hard to get.

Here’a test for the coming lambing season: put 10 or 12 pregnant ewes ready to pop in a small corral with infrared and low-light cameras trained on them from four angles, and film what happens.  

Better yet, ask the Countryside Alliance to pay for this little experiment.  Write to the newspapers and make sure television and print press is ready for the “proof” you are going to bring them.

Then, let me know what happens.