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

ByCraig Haley

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.

sheep-identities

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.

Keep up-to-date with all our latest articles. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Continued below...


Thanks for reading! But before you go… as part of our latest series of articles on how to earn a little extra cash using the Internet (without getting scammed) we have been looking into how you can earn gift vouchers (like Amazon vouchers) using reward-per-action websites such as SwagBucks. If you are interested we even have our own sign-up code to get you started. Want to learn more? We discuss it here. (Or you can just sign-up here and use code Nonsense70SB when registering.)

Become a Facebook Supporter. For 0.99p (~$1.30) a month you can become a Facebook fan, meaning you get an optional Supporter Badge when you comment on our Facebook posts, as well as discounts on our merchandise. You can subscribe here (cancel anytime.)