Part of 1. 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Environment and Rural Affairs – in the Senedd at 1:53 pm on 8 March 2017.
Cabinet Secretary, access to the countryside is something to be welcomed and hopefully it creates a greater understanding of what the countryside is for, which primarily is to produce food for us—to live off the fat of the land, as many people might say—but there is a serious issue about educating people when they do access fields and they do access the countryside that there are risks and there are dangers. In my own area of South Wales Central, only a couple of years ago several walkers sadly were trampled by cattle in the St Fagans and Radyr area. Across the UK, it is one of the biggest killers of people in the countryside: livestock interacting with people who aren’t aware of the safety precautions they need to take. Would you, along with your incentives to open up parts of the countryside, make sure that there is a robust education campaign and public awareness campaign out there, so that tragedies like those that have happened in my own region can be avoided wherever possible?