Every animal has an electronic tag with a unique number, read by a stick reader, and the numbers go to a government database. My gather reads three hundred and forty two. My holding register says three hundred and forty one.
I keep sheep on ninety acres of hill ground and I have done for thirty one years, and my father before me.
The counting is not folklore any more, which is the whole point of this.
Every animal born on this holding gets an electronic identification tag in its ear before it leaves, with a number that is unique to it in the world. The number is my flock number and then the animal's own.
I read them with a stick reader, which is a wand you wave near the ear, and it beeps and stores the number. Gathering, dosing, scanning, selling, everything gets read.
The numbers go into my holding register, which is a legal document, and movements go to the national database within three days.
Nobody in farming enjoys any of this. It is the most tedious part of the job. It is also the reason my numbers are numbers instead of an old man's opinion.
At every gather, the reader gives me one more animal than my register says I have.
Not a different total each time. One. Every gather, four or five a year, since 2013 when I went over to electronic reading.
The extra tag number is the same number every time.
It is a valid number in my flock's range, in the block I was issued in 2009. It reads clean off the wand and it has never once failed to read.
It is not in my register. I never recorded applying it, and my register for 2009 is complete, and the tags either side of it in the sequence are on two ewes I can name, one of which is dead and one of which I sold in 2016.
The national database.
I will go carefully here, because this is where a farmer gets into trouble.
I looked the number up on the movement database, which I can do because it is in my flock's range.
It is not registered. There is no birth notification and no movement against it. As far as the system is concerned that tag was issued to me in a batch and never used.
I have not reported the discrepancy, and that is a decision with consequences, because my register is supposed to reconcile and mine reconciles perfectly on paper and does not reconcile in a pen.
The annual inventory I submit is my register's number. It has been correct and honest every year, because the register is a record of the animals I have bought, bred, sold and lost, and every one of those is documented.
Which animal is it.
I do not know and I have tried very hard.
A gather brings them all into the pens and they go through a race one at a time and the reader picks up each one as it passes. It is a stream of numbers and there is no way to tie a number to an animal in the moment unless you stop and look.
So in 2018 I did it properly. I put a man on the reader and I stood at the end of the race with a can of marker and marked every animal that came through, and we did the whole flock in a day and a half and it cost me a day and a half.
Three hundred and eight animals marked. Three hundred and nine reads.
Every marked animal accounted for. The extra number came through somewhere in the stream and there was no unmarked sheep in the pen at the end.
The count by eye.
My father counted by eye and by heart for fifty years and he was never out by more than a couple.
I count by eye out of habit before every gather, standing at the top gate with the whole hill in front of me.
My eye count agrees with the register. It has always agreed with the register.
It is only the reader that says otherwise, and the reader is the thing the law believes.
The dog.
I have told two people in my life about the dog and one of them was the vet.
Meg is my third dog on this ground and she is nine. She is a good bitch and she works clean.
Since about 2019 she has stopped bringing them all in on the first cast on one particular part of the hill, which is the ground under the old wall by the shielding.
She goes out, she goes wide, and she comes back round short, and leaves that corner. And then she goes and lies down about twenty feet off it and waits.
I have made her go in. She goes, because she is a good dog, and she brings out nothing, and there is nothing in there, and it is bare ground and a fallen wall and you can see the whole of it from the track.
She will not do it twice in a day.
What I do about it.
The register is the register and I keep it right, because if the ministry come and my paperwork does not match my animals I lose my flock, and that is not a risk anybody in this trade takes for a curiosity.
What I have done, and I did it in 2020 and have not undone it, is that I took the tag number out of my reader's ignore list.
There is such a list. You use it for a tag you know is faulty so the wand stops beeping at you.
I had it on there for two years and it made every gather quiet and it made every total agree, and one morning in the lambing shed I took it off again, and I could not tell you why except that I did not like the total agreeing.
So it beeps. Once a gather, somewhere in the stream, a number I have never applied to an animal comes past the wand in a race full of my sheep.
And at the end of the day I take one off the total and write down what is true.