in dog attacks last year. NFU Mutual is urging dog owners to be responsible ahead of lambing season. The rural insurer says attacks are down 28% compared to 2024, but farmers are asking owners to stop their dogs chasing pregnant ewes and new born lambs.
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BBC Scotland above open with that puzzling sequence, putting a wee survey ahead of statistics.
Then Hannah Binns of the insurer ignores the reduction to tell us about her survey, which found
that one in ten owners said their dog had no recall, but 57% are letting their dogs off lead in the countryside. This is incredibly alarming!
Hannah! What’s most alarming is your lack of understanding here. One in ten no recall means 90% with recall? Yet only 57% let those dogs off lead when it could be 90%? So, lots of dogs with recall are still being kept on lead! Careful, responsible? Good? Very good? Get it?
BBC Scotland, why is the 28% reduction not the real news, especially if you noticed Hannah’s confusion? You did notice it? You don’t care about the truth? Ah, I’d forgotten that.
I didn’t easily find the NFU Scotland survey even though I asked Google specifically for a Scottish one. It gave me this kind of thing repeated across several media:
New figures from rural insurer NFU Mutual estimate that animals worth £1.95m were severely injured or killed in [UK] livestock attacks in 2025 — a 10% rise on the previous year.
The UK has around 12 times the population of Scotland so, you might reasonably expect, all things being equal, the UK figure to be around £1 million but it was nearly £2 million, twice the level of dog attacks in other parts of the UK than in Scotland?
And, don’t we, per head of people and presumably dogs, have more farmland with animals that in other parts of the UK?
Better dog owners up here? I’ve been a very good one myself, if I say so myself.
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Talking-up Scotland 
Dogs says woof woof…..show us the proof….
Liz S
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This is lazy journalism – take a press release and broadcast it verbatim with no checking then, accompany it with vox pop by the person who wrote the press release and do not question he about it.
Why was the story chosen? The NFU is an organisation dominated by landowners – the kind of establishment people whom the BBC supports unquestioningly. The story also has – forgive the pun – a dog whistling aspect. The owners of dogs who do not control their pets adequately are presented as coming from the lower social classes in reports about people and livestock being attacked by dogs. So, there is a social classes aspect being implied in this story – the property of wealthy people is being damaged by lower class people probably unemployed and in receipt of benefits. Ergo, BBC must publish it.
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