I was under the impression that the owner of Wyatt's Lake had been banned from keeping animals a couple of years back.  Perhaps now they will enforce it properly.

When working hard with animals they can do unpredictable things and as yet there is not enouph information to make any judgement. Sometimes help is all that is needed in these hard winter months not only for the farmer (who can hurt themselves) but the animals can be under stress very quickly too.

That makes no difference - there should not have been any animals at the farm because the owner was banned from keeping them for a period of ten years, after being convicted of cruelty and neglect.  In those circumstances 'unpredictable things' and 'stress' are irrelevant - those sheep and pigs simply should not have been in his care.

If the owner was banned from keeping animals, how come nobody reported or noticed it.

More importantly, why wait until the animals have suffered again for action to take place?

I am not defending bad farming, bad animal handleing, but if you know that we are in a very wet, cold time (the one thing that sheep do not like)then I would be looking over a hedge or asking the farmer if I could help. This might have helped the rest of the animals. There is no easy answer but the money, time, energy spent, will not have helped the remaining animals and with the court system we have is not getting any results. May I surjest a more proactive pratical aproach.

I have been told (how true this is, I don't know) that he was attempting to get round the ban by claiming that the animals belonged to a family member.  Leaving aside the issue of whether anyone would willingly hand over care of animals to someone who had been convicted of cruelty and neglect, my simple point remains - he should not have had them.  If he couldn't cope with those he had before, then he should not have taken on more, whether they were his or not.  For the full details of the previous case, you can look here in the Gazette archives: www.gazetteandherald.co.uk/.../  
At the time, I was told by a friend in the village who also keeps a flock that most of his sheep were so weak they could hardly stand, and that the prosecution was brought only for the most serious cases.
A ban on keeping animals should mean precisely that - no animals kept on your land or land you rent or occupy, whether they're yours or anyone else's.  And someone should check up regularly and enforce it.  Far too many people, farmers and others, treat their animals as disposable commodities, and don't seem to realise that they can suffer pain, disease and hunger just as humans do.