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Episode details

Radio 4,06 Sep 2026,22 mins

The dung beetle vet

On Your Farm

Available for over a year

Claire Whittle is a farm vet with a passion for nature and dung beetles in particular. After years working as a farm vet, she says she realised that the worming products she was prescribing for sheep and cows were damaging the ecosystems she cared about. Dung beetles she says, eat the larvae of parasites, and play a vital role in healthy ecosystems. She asks: “How can we be more like dung beetles, how can we process the muck in world around us and turn it into something good?” She's now taken on a hill farm in Wrexham and is building up a herd of beef cattle. She also works as a regenerative vet consultant - teaching people how to farm livestock with fewer medicines. Produced and presented by Rebecca Rooney

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