Revealed: How brutal criminal gangs are making millions of pounds sheep rustling then selling black market meat - leaving farmers turning on one another
Neil Fell had a heavy heart when he went to check on his Welsh mountain sheep on a warm August day last year.
His father Brian had passed away from cancer at the age of just 62 and Neil had attended his funeral at the family's local church in the County Durham village of Brancepeth only two days earlier.
Neither Neil nor his farmhands had done their daily check on the 800-strong flock grazing the land three miles from his farmhouse since the day of the funeral but, even so, nothing could have prepared Neil for what would greet him. Three hundred of his sheep – 120 ewes and 180 lambs worth about £18,000 in all – had been stolen. They had been removed, it later emerged, in broad daylight, perhaps at the very time that Neil's father was being laid to rest.
Neil Fell has a flock off 800 sheep, but when checking on them one day discovered 300 had been stolen
The impact has been devastating, not just in terms of the vast financial loss, but because the audacious nature of the robbery means it could only have been masterminded by someone who knew Neil would be burying his father at the time.
'The sheep being stolen is one thing, not to mention the fact that I was already grieving when it happened, but it's also the fact that it has to be someone who knew we weren't going to be there that day,' he says now.
'It just leaves this horrible seed of suspicion in your mind; have I spoken to the people responsible beforehand, or since?'
Alas, Neil is far from the only victim of such brazen livestock theft: today, sheep rustling is on the rise, with the latest figures showing £2.7million worth of sheep, cattle and pigs were stolen last year – a four-year high.
It's a business increasingly dominated by organised criminal gangs performing targeted raids up and down the country and, all too often, thanks to the inevitable lack of witnesses to crimes committed in remote rural locations and a shortage of local police officers, the clear-up rate is a miserly 1 per cent.
In Neil's case, a neighbour did actually see a lorry in his field on the day of the theft.
The owner of the cottage overlooking his land had seen figures loading the sheep into a white lorry with a silver wagon attached in the middle of the day.
'If it was midnight, she might have raised the alarm but, as it was broad daylight she didn't think anything of it – why would she?' says Neil. 'It was so utterly brazen.'
Sadly, as the vehicles and their occupants were so far away, she was unable to give a detailed description of them, leaving Neil to ask local auctioneers to inform him instantly if they were offered any Welsh mountain sheep.
'I'm the only one in this area with Welshies so if they were being sold locally then they would likely be mine,' he explains.
Unfortunately, none turned up and Neil now thinks that – unless they were transported out of the area – they will have been slaughtered, butchered and their meat sold on a thriving black market where a ewe can fetch £250 and a lamb £150.
Fell's neighbour saw figures moving the sheep, but as it was daylight did not suspect anything untoward and raise the alarm
Moreover, while he was compensated the £18,000 – the estimated cost of the sheep at market – by the National Farmers' Union's insurance wing NFU Mutual, he believes that if he had been able to rear the lambs and sell them at a more mature age, he could have made almost double.
'In farming terms that's a huge amount,' he says. 'It adds a lot more stress to my life, which I can do without. I've still got bills to pay; we're struggling to do that.'
Like all sheep over a year old, Neil's Welshies had electronic ear tags, but they are easily removed and replaced with new ones, while lambs under a year old remain untagged. It means that tracing a stolen sheep is well nigh impossible.
Fellow farmer Neil Cole, who runs a tenanted farm in Devon, explains that even in a legitimate slaughterhouse the sheer volume of livestock coming across their path means it can be hard for them to keep track.
'A slaughterhouse can be killing as many as 5,000 or 10,000 lambs a day,' says the 52-year-old.
'In theory, the movement forms you have to fill in when animals are sold or slaughtered should tally with the ear tags from any lambs over a year, but you can easily remove and replace ear tags. There are all sorts of illegal markets for meat and if someone moves stolen stock from one area to be slaughtered in another it is easy to conceal where animals have come from.'
Along with his brother Matthew and daughter Ida, Neil Cole's family has grazed 2,500 acres on Dartmoor, as well as the common land from their Duchy of Cornwall-tenanted farm between Tavistock and Princetown for decades – and lost 70 lambs to rustlers last month.
'There is always some natural wastage whether due to disease, traffic accidents or dog attacks, but you eventually find those carcasses,' Neil says. 'So far we have hardly found any, which means we have lost a third of any income we might make from keeping sheep. You don't need to be good at mathematics to know that is not sustainable.'
Having hundreds of sleep stolen has led farmer Colin Abel to 'question if it's someone you are having a pint with on occasion'
Alongside that anxiety, meanwhile, is the unsettling possibility that someone Neil knows may be responsible for his plight.
'Whoever is taking the lambs must have local knowledge, good dogs to help round the animals up, lookouts and transport whether it be a trailer or even a lorry to take their haul away,' he says.
'They know exactly what they are doing. It does sometimes lead me to question the trustworthiness of the people around me.'
As it does for Colin Abel, a fifth-generation farmer just up the road from Neil in Peter Tavy, near Tavistock, who has been in partnership for 40 years with his brothers Nicholas and Philip.
The family have a flock of 5,000 ewes which graze across 5,000 hectares of common land on Dartmoor and have lost hundreds of sheep to rustlers in recent years, with 550 stolen in 2021 and 400 last year.
'It's tough because you have a good idea of who might be helping to steal them and it has to be is someone with a good working knowledge of the moors,' he says.
'Inevitably it makes you question if it's someone you are having a pint with on occasion.
'You look at their new tractor and you wonder to yourself exactly how it was paid for. That is not a pleasant feeling.'
A recent report from the new National Rural Crime Unit (NRCU) – an eight-strong team comprising former police officers and agricultural experts – concluded there was an 'unequivocal' link between organised gangs and rural crime. 'Livestock theft itself is not a new phenomenon but in recent years it has become a highly organised crime, often involving 50 or more sheep being taken in one raid,' explains Hannah Binns, a rural affairs specialist at NFU Mutual, which funds the NRCU. 'It is a serious problem across the country.'
A spokesman for the organisation told the Mail it 'regularly' receives claims from customers of more than 50 sheep being taken in a single raid, numbers that would have been a rarity 15 years ago.
Martin Beck, a former police officer who is now the NRCU's livestock theft coordinator, says: 'We're still collecting data but we've already recorded around 90 separate livestock thefts so far this year, over 60 per cent of which are sheep, followed by 20 per cent cattle – and those are only the ones we know about, as not all get reported to the police. This amounts to hundreds and hundreds of farm animals every year.'
And Paul Stocker, chief executive of the National Sheep Association, says that while many sheep thefts remain 'opportunistic' the bigger raids are invariably undertaken 'within the industry' – meaning by farmers or former farmers themselves. 'As with all industries,' he says, 'there are some unscrupulous people about – it's certainly not all desperation.'
Not when there's easy money to be made.
'Mostly thieves want the sheep to be quickly turned into cash and the easiest and fastest way is to slaughter them,' explains Martin.
In some cases, sheep have even been slaughtered on site, in the fields from which they have been stolen, with thieves leaving behind butchered remains to save them having to transport live animals. This happened to farmer Lizzie Monk from Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, who says sheep have been stolen from her 300-acre farm every year for the past five years and who has found carcasses, stripped of their meat, abandoned on a local hill.
'They had their throats cut and they had been skinned,' she says. 'They had just the left the head and the skin behind and taken the meat.'
Thieves are even going after much loved domesticated sheep too: in Derby, 38-year-old Laura Windle had four sheep stolen in May from her animal shelter, My Pets Palace, and believes their destination was a backstreet slaughterhouse.
'The price has gone up dramatically for lamb. It's been high for quite a while,' she told the Mail. 'It's so easily done by someone that knows how and they would've gotten a good price for them, for the animals.
'There are dodgy people in the farming industry that know how to slit an animal's throat, who are trying to make a bit of change on the side.
'They know what they're doing. They know how to steal a sheep, how to get them and how to get rid of them.
'It's disgusting and dispiriting.'
And dangerous, according to Martin Beck, who points to the public health risk from eating unmonitored meat, not to mention animal welfare and disease risk from the uncontrolled movement of farm animals.
'This issue doesn't just affect farmers and their business,' he says. 'If you have uncontrolled meat entering the food chain you have a disease risk for animals and industry and public health.
'The animals can be slaughtered in unregulated and unhygienic conditions that turn a blind eye to the lack of correct paperwork, while sheep may be unfit for human consumption at the time they are stolen because they can still be on medication.
'If so, the chances of becoming ill are reasonably high.'
Farmers are fighting back. Some have turned to hi-tech security such as 'microdotting' fleeces with paint, which only shows up under special lighting, implanting tracking devices and even using drone patrols to deter thieves.
But as Colin Abel points out, it is hard for any farmer to take on an organised gang.
'You can try to make it more difficult,' he says. 'But if they are determined enough to take them then there is only so much you can do.'
