The sheep-theft epicentre where farmers are losing £500,000 of livestock

Telegraph

11-03-2025

On the rugged moorland of Dartmoor Common, hill farmer Colin Abel, 57, stands in the bright spring sunshine with his collie Pixie, surveying his land. Just east of Tavistock, Devon, it is a breathtaking view: a valley of undulating green fields dotted with sheep and ponies giving way to rugged moorland above.
As the highest upland in southern Britain, and part of Dartmoor National Park, the common is known for its open landscape and rocky granite outcrops. It is also where Abel grazes his 4,500 sheep for nine months of the year.
Yet the picturesque scene is being blighted by an increasingly pressing and thorny crime: that of sheep rustling. For hill farmers across the UK, such theft is nothing new. But the South West – and notably the remote landscape of Dartmoor – is becoming a growing epicentre of the illegal activity.
Figures from the UK livestock crime unit show that roughly 10 per cent (or 1,300) of all sheep stolen in 2024 were from Devon and Cornwall, with 62 per cent of these thefts from west Dartmoor. Meanwhile, rural insurer NFU Mutual estimates that livestock theft cost £2.7 million in 2023 – a similar figure to that of 2022, demonstrating, it says, that this is a 'persistent problem'.
For Abel, the impact on his flock is an alarming concern, not least because it comes on top of existing pressures on farmers to meet green targets and potentially stump up inheritance tax.
Last year, his Lower Godsworthy farm, which has been in the family since 1888, had 450 ewes stolen from them.
'We did a stocktake in November and I'd lost 10 per cent, many of them pregnant ewes,' he tells The Telegraph. 'It's devastating, a huge mental strain – and the trend is getting worse. A few years ago, I lost 600, but a decade or so ago, I was losing roughly 250.
'I think over the past decade, I have lost around £500,000 worth of livestock. This is on top of the cost of feeding them, which can be £100 a week per sheep for my whole 4,500 flock. Any losses are not covered by insurance, due to the inhibitive cost of premiums. So to keep losing stock in such numbers is unsustainable.'
Abel is one of 850 farmers who have ancient rights to graze their livestock on the 88,500-acre common. He grazes a mix of Welsh mountain sheep and Scotch Blackface specifically chosen to cope with the upland terrain and diseases caused by ticks, making any thefts particularly hard to take as they affect the genetic bloodline. Abel keeps an artificially high number of breeding ewes on his land to accommodate such losses; otherwise, he would have to import sheep from elsewhere, which would not be used to the upland terrain.
But despite his efforts to protect his bloodlines, he is well aware that the remote, unguarded landscape is easy prey for criminals. The upland landscape where the sheep graze is completely wild and away from human settlements. Around 34,000 people live in the National Park but that's mostly in the towns and villages dotted around. Much of the Park is peatland or bogs; at times, cattle get swallowed up.
Police believe the sheep are rounded up with dogs and quad bikes at nighttime into vans, or even taken in broad daylight by people involved in the livestock industry who have knowledge of how to move and process sheep.
On rare occasions, ewes have been known to be slaughtered on-site, but more often, young lambs are taken. One hypothesis is that the lambs have their ear tags swapped and are then 'reidentified' into another farmer's flock, although there have been no prosecutions for this.
Martin Beck, appointed in 2024 as the UK's first national livestock theft specialist police officer, tells The Telegraph: 'Of all the livestock that is stolen, 70 per cent is sheep, and half of that is lambs. This is a national problem, affecting not just Devon but also Cumbria and parts of Wales – anywhere with high sheep stock – and it is ingrained in the livestock community.
'We often do not know who is doing it, but we know it must be someone who can catch, process and make money from the crime, and it is more than just theft. These animals may be illegally slaughtered, with their disease and medicine status unknown, making this a national food security issue.'
For PC Julian Fry, of Devon and Cornwall Police's Rural Affairs Team, the thefts on Dartmoor are a continuing menace, exacerbated by the fact that there are currently limited effective tracking devices for livestock. For instance, satellite tracking collars can be placed upon animals, but these are often very expensive, visible to thieves and easily removed. Microchips such as those often used in cats and dogs are not recommended for animals destined for the food chain.
Despite there having been no prosecutions for sheep theft in the past five years in Devon and Cornwall, he insists his teams are constantly working on how to improve forensics, tracking and surveillance to help target the criminals.
'We have four rural police officers for Devon and Cornwall and we all have a huge amount of passion and drive to support farmers,' he says.'These crimes can be hard to tackle; there is no CCTV and often they are only reported retrospectively. But we are constantly looking at cutting-edge forensics and technology to catch the culprits.
'We are working with abattoirs, commoners and farmers and we are constantly building intelligence. I am convinced that soon, we will have convictions. The day will come when livestock crime is a thing of the past.'
Seven miles from Lower Godsworthy farm, sheep rustling has also blighted the work of farmer Neil Cole, 53, who grazes a flock of Scotch Blackface sheep on the moor.
'It's not just the ewes that get stolen, but cattle and lamb too,' he says. 'Last year, we turned out 220 lambs and got around 160 back due to losses and theft. For someone to steal 50 of them at £150 a lamb is soul-destroying. It's more than £7,000.'
Cole says that while it wasn't his worst year for theft, the general trend is magnifying, he believes because of the rising value of sheep and cattle.
Last year saw record-high prices of lamb, driven by a continued decline in the female breeding flock, a reduced lamb crop and high demand at certain times such as Christmas and Ramadan.
Despite this, Cole says many younger farmers in the region are not seeing a future in farming the moor.
'There are so many pressures,' he says. 'Cars, dogs, disturbances, the pressure from environmentalists, theft. People dumped a load of laurel on the moor recently – and that's poisonous to animals. All these combining pressures mean youngsters and tenant farmers look at the bottom line and decide it's just not worth it.
'And the fact people doing the thieving must have industry knowledge of how to handle sheep is causing division in the community.'
For many of the moor's upland farmers, the problems caused by sheep rustling are the tip of the iceberg.
For years now, they have been under pressure to reduce stock because of environmental concerns; indeed, over the past two decades, Abel alone has reduced his stock by 50 per cent.
'Some environmentalists want sheep off the land completely,' he adds. 'Already we bring our cattle off the hill all winter. But although our enclosed farm is 2,000 acres, this isn't enough for the sheep; they need the common. And if sheep didn't graze the moor, it would probably catch fire every year.'
Currently, Dartmoor National Park – in large part a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and home to cuckoos and rare ground-nesting birds such as lapwings – is undergoing a review of how the land should best be managed to meet its competing demands.
A 2023 report by Natural England – the government's nature watchdog – said parts of the park were worryingly overgrazed, with the ecological condition of Dartmoor having 'declined significantly'. Some 93 per cent of the park's SSSIs are currently classed as being in an 'unfavourable ecological condition'.
Highlighting that the current approach was 'not working', the report stressed that year-round intensive grazing had been introduced only after the Second World War and that grazing numbers needed to be slashed.
It also pointed out that farming on Dartmoor was 'economically extremely marginal' – and viable only through the income from governmental agri-environmental schemes.
For Richard Drysdale, the director of conservation and communities at Dartmoor National Park Authority, the farmers who manage the land are acutely aware of the pressures upon them.
'Dartmoor is a contested landscape,' he tells The Telegraph. 'There are free-roaming sheep, ponies and cattle, and farmers are facing ever-increasing costs to manage their stock and land over huge areas, and then deal with the pressure of these increasingly brazen thefts.'
In addition to supporting the farming community, he says the park is dealing with the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, and is working with farmers and other partners to restore peatlands and increase tree cover.
There has also been an increase in housing in the local area, a growing number of visitors to the park, and a rise in the number of dog attacks on livestock.
He adds: 'Dartmoor has more pressures and threats than ever before, and the hill-farming community is central in helping address those. Dartmoor is an incredible landscape – the largest wilderness in southern England – and we have to work together to protect it.'
Back at Lower Godsworthy farm, it is this rugged wilderness that has captured the heart of Abel's farming daughter, Megan Abel-Lethbridge.
Aged just 27, she works full time on the land, and is mostly seen driving the tractor and bedding up the cattle. Soon, the farm will be passed into her ownership in an attempt by her father to circumvent Chancellor Rachel Reeves's plans to impose 20 per cent inheritance tax on agricultural assets worth more than £1 million.
On the day The Telegraph visits the farm, she is out on her quad bike, checking on the cattle in their pens before heading up to the moor to see her flock.
'There's not many women in Dartmoor farming as it's so physical,' she says. 'But I am committed to taking it over. I love the work, especially at lambing and calving time, and being up on the moor is just breathtaking.'
What does she think of the insidious crime of sheep rustling?
'Farming is such hard work,' she says. 'And there are enough barriers in this industry already. We are just trying to make a living and feed the nation. It's criminal.'