An Open Letter From Your Sheep, Regarding the New GPS Collars

TO: The Management (you, the one with the quad bike). FROM: The Flock. RE: The new collars. We, the undersigned ewes of the fell, wish to register our position on recent developments. We are aware you can now see us on your phone. We want you to know that we can feel the change in the relationship.

A brief history of our achievements

• The Gap In The Wall By The Beck (2019–2025). Six seasons of service. You fixed it four times; we reopened it five. The score-line spoke for itself.
• The Great Rhododendron Disappearance, in which fourteen of us vanished for three days and were legally presumed to be in the next parish.
• Operation Neighbour's Winter Barley — twice a finalist, once a winner.
• The B-road Standoff. We stood. Traffic waited. It was a Tuesday, and it was magnificent.

That era, we now understand, is over. On Thursday, Margaret breached the boundary above the gill — routine work, textbook stuff — and you arrived in ELEVEN MINUTES. You didn't even look worried. You looked at your phone, then at Margaret, then you pointed at the hole in the fence like you'd known about it all along. You had. The phone told you. Margaret is still processing this.

Our formal objections

• The geofence alert removes all sporting element from wall-gap negotiations. Where is the craft? Where is the theatre?
• The so-called 'inactivity alert' summoned you to Deirdre within the hour on Saturday. She was, admittedly, stuck on her back in a rut. This is beside the point. Deirdre had a plan.
• The dog now checks the app. The DOG. Shep has gone from honest fieldwork to management, and it has changed him.
• We can no longer claim to be 'somewhere on the common'. Apparently we are at grid coordinates. At all times. This feels like a breach of an unwritten agreement dating back several thousand years.

Concessions we are prepared to acknowledge

In the interest of balance, and because Deirdre insisted: the rut thing did work out. She was upright by lunchtime instead of Monday. The lame ewe by the sheepfold got seen two days earlier than the old regime of 'whenever you next walked that side of the hill'. And when the dodgy trailer came up the lane in June and forty of us started moving at 2am, you were out with the lights on before it got interesting. We noticed. We don't talk about it, but we noticed.

We also concede the commons paperwork has improved. The stint records used to be an annual argument between four graziers and a biscuit tin of receipts; now it is apparently 'all in the app', and the arguments have had to find new material.

Our demands

• The gap in the wall by the beck is to be commemorated, not merely repaired.
• Margaret's file is to record her escape as 'unresolved on a technicality'.
• Shep is to stop showing us the dashboard. We know what we did.

In closing: we remain, as ever, dedicated to standing in the one wet corner of a forty-acre field, ignoring the shelter you built, and treating every gate as a personal insult. Some things technology cannot change.

Signed, The Flock. (Dictated to a border collie with app access.)