Rebecca Davidson, a rural affairs specialist at NFU Mutual, said rustling caused suffering to farmers and to the animals.

She said: “Rustling has always been an aspect of farming but 10 years ago we would rarely see claims of more than a dozen sheep taken in one go. We are now regularly getting reports of 50-100 sheep being taken in a single raid and it is devastating for farmers.

“As well as causing untold suffering to sheep, which may be in lamb when they are stolen, rustling is causing high levels of anxiety for farmers who have built up their flocks over many years.

“Rustlers are getting more skilled and organised, quickly loading sheep on to trailers and lorries late at night. We are concerned that gangs are now using working sheepdogs, which have also been stolen, to get the job done.”

An alarming trend is the illegal butchery of animals in the field. Rather than having the bother of moving animals – and hiding them until they or their meat can be sold on – thieves sometimes prefer to kill them where they are, butcher the carcasses and leave the remains.

Farmers and their families are devastated when they go to check their flocks to find the bloodied remains. Davidson added: “We believe that meat from stolen animals is being sold on the black market and undermining welfare standards.”

The farmers are trying to fight back. Where possible, they are grazing animals away from roads. Some are setting up devices such as infra-red beams across gates that send alerts to mobile phones if broken. But it can be costly, time-consuming and not always effective.

Britain’s rolling green pastures and country lanes have witnessed a spike in criminals targeting farms, new data shows.

Losses to British farmers from theft hit a seven-year high of £50m in 2018, according to rural insurer NFU Mutual.

A 26% rise in claims for stolen farm vehicles, such as tractors and quad-bikes, to £7.4m last year, was behind the overall increase.

Animal theft claims rose 3.7% to £2.5m in 2018, the company said.

As a result of the crimes, farmers are reporting increased levels of anxiety and isolation to NFU Mutual agents.

Tim Price, from the NFU Mutual, said: “Farmers and country people are suffering from high levels of anxiety due to repeated thefts by gangs who take advantage of farms’ isolated locations to steal machinery, raid tool stores and even butcher sheep in the fields.

“In a single generation, country people have seen rural crime change from the opportunist theft of a single lamb, to brazen heists of tractors worth over £100,000 and rustlers stealing hundreds of sheep,” Mr Price added.

The humble sheep has long been judged a placid and witless creature, a view epitomised by Winston Churchill when he labelled Clement Attlee a ‘sheep in sheep’s clothing’

But a new study by Cambridge University suggests that we may have underestimated the intellectual capacities of the wooly hill-dwellers.

Sheep can recognise human faces, spot the facial features of their handlers, and can even distinguish Fiona Bruce from Emma Watson.

In experiments in which the farm animals were rewarded with food for picking out portraits of Bruce, Watson, Barack Obama, and Jake Gyllenhaal sheep proved they were experts at identifying individuals.

In fact, they could even recognise people when pictures were altered or were taken from a different angle, an ability only previously recorded in humans and primates.

Clad in a sparkling ball gown and tuxedo, the stars of the latest film to premiere in London’s Leicester Square walked the red carpet in a rather unusual manner – on four legs.

The stars in question were a group of sheep who feature in a new eight-hour, dialogue-free film “Baa Baa Land” – billed by its makers as the dullest movie ever made.

It’s not so much watching the grass grow as watching it be eaten.

The film – whose title plays on Hollywood hit “La La Land” — features no actors, words or narrative and consists entirely of slow-motion shots of sheep in a field in Essex, England.

It was made as a tongue-in-cheek insomnia cure, by Calm.com, one of the companies vying for a piece of the fast-growing mindfulness industry, part of what the Global Wellness Institute estimates is a $3.7 trillion global wellness market.

The number of sheep in New Zealand has dropped to the lowest on record since the Second World War – at 29.6 million.

Sheep were first introduced to New Zealand in 1773 by British explorer Captain James Cook and later by missionary Samuel Marsden.

The rapid sheep population growth that occurred in the 1850s and 1860s was largely a result of permanent immigration, according to figures from the New Zealand government.

The animals now outnumber people living there at a ratio of six to one, but numbers have been declining since their peak in 1982.

To put the drop in perspective, in that year New Zealand had 70.3 million sheep and a population of 3.18 million people – the equivalent of 22 sheep per person.

“Wool, at last, is starting to make a comeback from the doldrums of only a few years ago when farmers could barely give fleeces away.  This year, wool prices at auction have reached a 25-year high with some species of fleece fetching £1.46 a kilogram (two years ago the average price was less than £1 a kilogram). It’s good news for upland sheep farmers, who keep our countryside so beautifully, and as a sustainable, British and renewable material, it’s also one of the greenest.”