Kevin Prince has wide experience of farming and rural business in Hampshire, where he lives near Andover, and across southern England as a director in the Adkin consultancy. His family also run a diversified farm with commercial lets, holiday cottages and 800 arable acres.

 

Soon many frustrated parents will take their children to zoos and similar venues to keep them entertained during the six-week summer holidays.

There, they will likely encounter signs bearing the instruction: “Please do not feed the animals”. Sadly I have now had to resort to despoiling the countryside with similar signs and it has caused me to reflect on the reason why.

A public footpath crosses the paddock home to our three ponies. They are that type of Welsh Mountain pony that not only gets obese if fed a tiny bit too much but is also prone to laminitis, a dreadfully debilitating condition which affects the tissue within the hoof and leaves the pony lame. It can be fatal in severe cases and can be brought on by (amongst other things) too much sugar – not just as cubes but also as fruit such as apples - in the diet so their intake is very carefully monitored and managed.

We had, at certain times over a few days, noticed the ponies become more agitated than usual. At the apparent time on the fourth day I went to investigate and found a friendly footpath walker merrily feeding their new equine best friends. I very politely asked them to please stop and very (I thought) carefully explained the reason why it was not a good idea to feed someone else’s animals. I might as well have been speaking Martian as the walker continued to feed the ponies even as I was explaining the damage it could do.

Eventually the message appeared to sink in. However, it made me think why had the situation arisen in the first place? I pondered that historically this would not have happened, firstly because our own food was valued far more and so no one would have dreamt of wasting it on an animal, secondly, more people interacted far more with many different animal types on a daily basis and may well have seen a distressed pony with laminitis, and, thirdly, and probably most importantly, animals were viewed as animals rather than anthropomorphised.

So can I plead with anyone tempted to feed any animal that they do not have responsibility for – please don’t!  An act of perceived kindness could be the cruellest thing to do. The same applies with farm animals which are also on carefully balanced diets even at times when they are in fields apparently just eating grass, the nutritional value of which is carefully measured.

Although we are not a big country it does sometimes feel that our region could be in a different hemisphere from other parts of the UK as relatively minor weather changes make a huge difference to crop yield. Of two things I can be certain; the weather will be the inevitable topic of conversation and no one there will try to feed our dogs!