Police are appealing for information and urging rural residents to be vigilant after ten lambs were stolen from a field near Harrogate.
Some time in the last week, the ten Texel lambs were taken from a property on the B6161 Otley Road near Beckwithshaw. They were not tagged or marked.
If you can provide any information which may help officers with their enquiries, please call North Yorkshire Police on 101 and quote reference number NYP-16072017-0428.
Inspector Jon Grainge, of North Yorkshire Police’s Rural Taskforce, said:
Over recent years, North Yorkshire Police and surrounding rural forces have taken an increasing number of reports relating to the theft of sheep. The Rural Taskforce has been focusing on this problem, and we have identified that sheep have been stolen, often in ones and twos, sometimes in trailer-loads. Some will be destined almost immediately for the illegal meat trade, while others are ‘hidden’ in open view in fields and barns across a wide geographic area.
The difficulty with the nature of this crime is that it is not necessarily immediately obvious to farmers, who may only be able to identify their shortfall at the time of bringing sheep in to scan or to worm, which often gives a very wide timeframe for us to work with. Lines of enquiry are limited, and this is where we need the public’s help to call in suspicious movements of animals, or animals appearing in fields unexpectedly.
