“If you are considering dyeing a sheep, first ensure that it is your own sheep”.

A huge debt of gratitude to the Guardian for alerting us to that most worrying of modern plagues, the tendency so many people have to dye sheep that don’t belong to them. Would that Dobson were with us now! In his pamphlet How To Dye A Goat (out of print), he hammered home the very same point, or almost the same point, attending as he did to the dyeing of goats rather than to the dyeing of sheep, over dozens of pages, to such effect that there is not a single recorded incident of a person dyeing someone else’s goat for the entire period that the pamphlet was available in all good goat-related bookshops and/or airport terminals.