Horses should not be killed for meat, hides, or products. Tell Congress to support the SAFE Act & close the horse slaughter loophole. Act now: bit.ly/4edo8dy Pls RT & support bit.ly/4g38kN6 #Horses #SAFEAct #EndHorseSlaughter

This year the Home Office moved to stop expert sheep shearers from Australia and New Zealand coming to shear British sheep. The people who keep the animals comfortable were declared surplus to requirements. For over a decade, around 75 of the best shearers on earth have flown in each spring on a simple visa concession. In a few brutal weeks they take the wool off up to two million sheep. A top shearer clears a ewe in two or three minutes. Hundreds a day. Calm hands, no panic in the animal. It is a global trade and a young body's game, and Britain has never grown enough of its own. The official line? Fourteen years to train Britons, so the door is closing. Here is what that tidy sentence ignores. A sheep must be shorn every year or she overheats, cannot move properly, and gets eaten alive by flies and maggots. Shearing on time is welfare, plain and simple, written into law and into the animal's own skin. So a government that lectures farmers without pause about welfare has quietly made the most basic welfare task harder to carry out. After the outcry they allowed one "final" year. Then the experts are gone for good. A sector already losing money on every fleece, already burning wool it cannot sell, now told it cannot even get the people in to take the wool off. You could be forgiven for thinking somebody wants the British sheep gone.

Since Tuesday there have been 49 incidents involving animals and no reported dog or horse thefts 17 x Other (mainly wild animals on the highway) 11 x Dog related (banned/dangerous) 6 x Loose horse 8 x Welfare 5 x Loose farm animal

Waiting for the rain to come in. #ponyhour #FridayFeeling #ShetlandPony