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I also thought subsidies were the elephant in the room. As it is, I mentioned the price of that lamb once it hit the market, and that's with (unacknowledged) subsidies.
I'm quite sure Catlady isn't reading this, but from the point of view of the sheep, this seems to me to be pretty idyllic. They have a good life; they're largely left to live on their own but with built in protections against the vagaries of nature and, this is the key element, this is how they got to have a life. And for sheep in the wild, the end mostly can't be pretty, either.
But I digress. I suspect it's one of those situations where most of us prefer the middle option, but that we also don't examine our assumptions enough. We tend to deplore the totally mechanized society because of the toll it takes on the individual, but we can't sustain, either logically or economically, Marie Antoinette-style Petits Hameaux, either. So the key element is making it pay, in some form or another. In this case, it's tourism; in the case of farm subsidies in general there seems to be more of an element at least in this country of a nebulous sense of the noble farmer, the descendent of pioneers, although there's also the argument that it's important to maintain farms as a hedge against the unknown future. One thinks of Britain in WWII, for example, when it couldn't feed itself, or Germany at the end of the Great War when a starving population helped tipped the balance - and Germany learned from that for the next war.
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