EDUCATION
Notice and Information
In the locations and situations where sheep are present or likely, there are quite a lot of notices placed towards the protection of sheep, towards keeping them safe. Most are ‘official’, provided by authorities and organisations. There are others that are clearly ‘individually-made’. For conjecture is: whether that there is a notice is ‘clocked’ by people at all; whether what it says is ‘taken in’ by them; whether their behaviour is such that it demonstrates support for the information given and the message conveyed. Essentially, the notices are for road users and for countryside walkers and users.
Notices can be in various categories. A sign at a roadside indicating presence of sheep hereabout is essentially a notice of warning - to road drivers to drive slowly and with due caution. A notice of sheep grazing in a field or on open areas and where there is access to the public for walking and recreation, and which asks persons accompanied by dogs to have their dogs on lead, gives both a general and a specific warning. A notice by a road telling vehicle drivers ‘Lambs Slow Down’ is not just giving a warning, it is giving an order. A sign on the back of a sheep trailer saying ‘Caution Sheep in Transit’ is giving drivers of other nearby vehicles information and asking that they should exercise caution. In essence what is being ‘said’ by the sign is ‘please drive in such a way as to not cause the driver of the vehicle pulling the trailer with sheep in to need to stop sharply or do anything else sudden that could cause the sheep in the trailer to be discomforted or harmed’. A lot of notices have the purpose to get people who are in the vicinity of sheep and who have dogs with them to keep those dogs on a short lead at all times, and they also have the aim to inform of the threat of prosecution for failure to keep a dog on a lead.
A notice (from the National Trust) that was observable during this dry UK summer warned not to light fires or barbeques and not to smoke because of ‘High risk of fire’. This risk might be seen as not directly concerning for sheep. But it is of course. The risk depicted is to lands such as are inhabited by sheep in many parts of the world, and so there is very real risk to sheep.
The kinds of notices discussed are aimed to eye-catch and to inform. For considering is not just whether the notices are achieving the notice providers’ aim of making people do at a present moment what the providers want, but whether on-going and long-term education has been achieved, and with a consequent improvement in human behaviour towards sheep.
8th October 2026