FRESH calls have been issued for greater protection of a rare sheep breed which lives on a collection of Scottish islands.
Roaming wild in St Kilda, the eponymously named Soay sheep descended from an earlier population of feral sheep brought to the land thousands of years ago.
As reported by the BBC, vets David Buckland and Graham Charlesworth have said that on the main island of Hirta, hundreds of Soay starve to death every winter because of a lack of grazing. The Uist-based vets are looking to control the sheep’s population to prevent this.
Both the Scottish Government and the National Trust for Scotland (NTS) have said the Soay are wild animals and so are not covered by the same welfare laws which protect farm animals.
Buckland and Charlesworth, however, argue that the sheep are not actually native to St Kilda and have been domesticated over thousands of years, meaning they should be protected the same way sheep kept on farms are.
They analysed figures from the University of Edinburgh’s St Kilda Soay Sheep Project, which has been collecting data since the mid-1980s, and suggested that more than 1000 of the creatures had died, with yearly average mortality rates rarely dipping below 400.
Buckland told the BBC that taking a small number of the sheep off Hirta to reduce the population would help provide adequate grazing for the population left on the island during the winter.
"In some ways for a vet it's not the numbers dying, it's the manner of dying”, he told the broadcaster’s Eorpa programme. "Starvation is not a good death and it's the suffering that concerns us."
Soay on St Kilda are protected by the Wild Mammals (Protection) Act 1996, and the NTS said that the remote geography of the island would make it difficult to manage the sheep.
A Scottish Government 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."
The NTS added that if the Government were to reclassify Soay, the organisation would “change with them”.
Professor Josephine Pemberton, who was in charge of the St Kilda Soay Sheep Project for several years, said human intervention could lead to the sheep becoming more vulnerable to disease and parasites, adding that “winter mortality of lambs removes inbred individuals”.
