Please close gate behind you! (From Basingstoke Gazette)

Please close gate behind you!

8:49am Friday 29th January 2010

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Sir.–In the recent snowy weather, it has been fun to watch families enjoying themselves building snowmen and tobogganing and, indeed, we have several hilly fields where this has taken place.

While we have no objection whatsoever to local people using our fields for this purpose, may I use this opportunity to beg those who do access fields in which stock is kept to ensure that they close gates behind them.

As a direct result of fun in the snow, we have four pregnant sheep dead and five others to which the vet had to be called. A gate was left open and our sheep escaped into surrounding woodland where some of them ate leaves from a laurel hedge which are very poisonous.

The least of the inconvenience was that my husband had to trudge through deep snow to retrieve them, and the worst is the death and suffering of the poisoned animals.

When I was a child, growing up in an urban northern town where it was unlikely to have been of much use, we were all taught the Country Code, the first part of which was that one should always close gates.

It is a pity that rural families now appear to be unaware of this piece of common sense.

–Lydia Massey, West End Farm, Mortimer West End.

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