Yes, police really did release image of sheep with faces blurred out…

Police in the West Midlands had plenty of social media users perplexed this week after releasing an image of 3 young victims of a kidnapping scam with their faces blurred to protect their identities.

This sounds normal enough. After all, police are bound by law to protect the identities of victims of crime if they happen to be under-age, and blurring or pixelating their faces is a common way to ensure they cannot be recognised.

Only in this case, those 3 young victims happened to be sheep.

West Midlands police released an image (below) of 3 sheep that had been stolen in a sheep rustling scheme. The two sheep that had their faces visible had them blurred out.

While the crime was real – 3 men were arrested as a result of the theft – the photo is completely genuine, albeit a somewhat tongue-in-cheek joke.

While the official line from the West Midlands police was ”the lambs identity was protected due to their age and vulnerability””, Dominic Cascianani from the BBC claimed –

My mint sources tell me that an officer in the case blurred the image as a joke.
He presumably concluded he had an obligation under the Ewe-ropean Convention on Eweman Rights to hide the poor little lambs’ faces.