Fresh call from Uist vets for controls on remote St Kilda’s sheep | UK News

Two vets have renewed their appeal for greater protection for a rare breed of sheep that lives on a remote Scottish archipelago.

Soay roam wild on St Kilda and are descended from animals first brought to the group of small islands and rocky sea stacks thousands of years ago.

David Buckland and Graham Charlesworth say that on the main island of Hirta, hundreds of sheep starve to death every winter due to a lack of grazing. They want the animals’ numbers controlled.

But National Trust for Scotland (NTS), which owns St Kilda, and the Scottish government say the sheep are wild animals and do not come under welfare laws that protect farm animals.

Sheep were first brought to St Kilda in prehistoric times, and the rare breed is named after the archipelago’s small, uninhabited island of Soay.

The animals are small and their fleeces have a wide range of colours and shades, including dark brown.

Sheep taken from Soay were raised as livestock on Hirta, the largest island, until the last inhabitants abandoned St Kilda in 1930, taking their animals with them.

In the years that followed, about 100 sheep were moved from Soay to Hirta.

Today there are more than 1,800 sheep on Hirta, according to the latest figures of the University of Edinburgh’s St Kilda Soay Sheep Project.

The project has been gathering data since 1985.

Vets David Buckland and Graham Charlesworth argue that the sheep are not native to St Kilda and have undergone thousands of years of domestication, so should treated the same way as sheep on farms are.

They said their analysis of the St Kilda Soay Sheep Project’s figures suggested more than 1,000 sheep, which included lambs, had died in some years.

They claimed yearly mortality rates on average were seldom lower than 400.

Mr Buckland said small numbers should be taken off Hirta each year to reduce the population.

He said this would provide adequate grazing in winter for the animals left on the island.

He told Alba’s Eòrpa programme: “In some ways for a vet it’s not the numbers dying, it’s the manner of dying.

“Starvation is not a good death and it’s the suffering that concerns us.”

Mr Buckland added: “The problem is the lack of grazing in winter and the lack of control of the population.

“We are not looking for intensive farming, we are just looking at measures to reduce the suffering and reduce the numbers dying from starvation.”

Mr Charlesworth, now a retired vet, said: “Pain and suffering is natural but cruelty is a human concept and really that is sort of what you are seeing happening out there.”

The Scottish government said St Kilda’s flock was protected by the Wild Mammals (Protection) Act 1996, the same protection given to Scotland’s wild deer population.

A spokesperson said: “The Soay sheep on St Kilda are considered wild animals due to their unique history of adapting to life without management for many generations.”

Diarmaid Hearns, of NTS, said St Kilda’s remote location would make managing the sheep challenging.

He added: “It would be a real change in thinking from government for them to be reclassified.

“We are always interested in what other people’s views are and if times change then we will change with them.”

Prof Josephine Pemberton, who ran the St Kilda Soay Sheep Project for many years, said intervention could lead to the population becoming less resilient to disease and parasites.

She added: “Winter mortality of lambs removes inbred individuals, removes bad genes, so the flock has this purging thing the whole time which I don’t think we would be able to organise.”

St Kilda is more than 40 miles (64km) west of the Western Isles.

Hirta is inhabited but only on a temporary basis by visiting NTS workers, scientists and also contractors who work at small Ministry of Defence site.