Did the Woman Who Stole King Charles’s Lambs Feel Sheepish?

Animal rights campaigner Rose Patterson says she is deeply disappointed after being convicted of taking three lambs from King Charles’s Sandringham estate in Norfolk in 2023.

“I thought there was a 50-50 chance, but the verdict still surprised me,” she says of the decision reached after her three-day trial. Her expectations, however, were unlikely to include a royal honour — or perhaps even an Order of the Baaaaa-th.

Patterson says she felt conflicted because she never believed rescuing the animals amounted to a criminal act. “It was a sheep open rescue, not a sheep crime,” she insists, noting that she later handed herself in to police.

After becoming attached to the lambs, whom she named Sunny, Sammy and Sooty, Patterson and two fellow activists loaded them into a van. The animals were then taken to an undisclosed sanctuary, where they could live out their lives rather than face the usual prospect of slaughter at around five months old.

“I saved their lives,” she says. “They are now somewhere secret and safe from slaughter, with the freedom to grow old. I have no regrets. I also believe King Charles might understand what I did because he is an environmentalist as well.”

That argument may be difficult for the King to accept. Alongside his environmental interests, Charles is an established sheep farmer — and may not welcome activists entering his land and removing animals from his 3,000-strong flock of prized organic Aberfield sheep to highlight an animal-rights message.

The jury at Norwich Crown Court took a similarly firm position. After almost four hours of deliberation, five men and seven women unanimously found Patterson and her two co-defendants guilty. The trio were fined a combined total of slightly more than £1,000 and each ordered to complete 150 hours of unpaid work.

“I was disappointed and sad,” says Patterson, who leads Animal Rising, the non-violent campaign group formerly known as Animal Rebellion. The organisation advocates a sustainable, plant-based food system and greater protections for animals, including an end to their use as food.

“The verdict made me realise how much work remains,” she adds. “It is depressing to think about how far we still have to go before animals are freed from the terrible situation they face.”

Patterson appears ready for a long campaign. At 37, she embodies the lifestyle of a committed modern vegan and animal rights activist, with every detail of her east London life reflecting her beliefs.

She rents a two-bedroom home beside the river overlooking Leyton Marshes, while much of her mid-century-style furniture has been bought second-hand through sites including Vinted and eBay.

Her routine includes yoga and pilates. She wears winged eyeliner, avoids leather and feathers, chooses cruelty-free household products and keeps her refrigerator stocked with kale, oat milk, dairy-free mozzarella and packets of Squeaky Bean’s vegan chicken-style bites.

“The Cajun flavour is my favourite,” she says while preparing green tea, pointing to the word “ahimsa” tattooed on her right wrist. The Sanskrit term refers to compassion and non-violence towards all living beings.

Patterson shares the home with her husband, Wayne, and their two rescue dogs: Oliver, a Korean Jindo, and James, a beagle. All four residents follow a vegan lifestyle — including the dogs.

Wayne, an animal rights lawyer from San Francisco, rescued Oliver from a dog meat factory in China. Patterson took in James after he was removed from a testing laboratory. She earns £39,000 a year as Animal Rising’s director, having first joined the organisation as a volunteer in 2019.

Her activism has brought more than 20 arrests. On one occasion, she was detained after placing red dye in a Trafalgar Square fountain as part of a protest intended to draw attention to the climate impact of animal agriculture.

That case was dismissed by a judge, who ruled that the dye was temporary and had caused no damage.

What? I like Rose, I admire her commitment to her beliefs, but dyeing a fountain? What an utter waste of court time, police time, everybody’s time, including hers.

However, in this curious world of provocative activism, practitioners feel they have the moral warrant to do as they please in the name of the cause.

In addition to the lamb heist, Rose has three more criminal convictions – one for aggravated trespass at a beagle breeding facility in Huntington, one for criminal damage during a protest and blockade outside a McDonald’s burger factory in Scunthorpe, and one for disrupting a horserace at a track in Ayr.

Rose, I cry, what are you really? An animal activist or just a public nuisance? ‘Well, I’ve never been convicted of causing a public nuisance, so I don’t think I am one,’ she says mildly.

Her worst moment came when Animal Rising were still called Animal Rebellion and they were going through a phase of using ‘lock-on’ equipment to make their point – chaining themselves to the gates of Smithfield meat market in London, blockading the streets of Westminster to demand that financial institutions stop backing animal agriculture, and so on. At the 2021 McDonald’s factory protest, Rose chained herself to a van using a pair of thumb cuffs.

‘That was a mistake. The police removed me by pulling my thumbs out and I was screaming in pain. I kicked out and accidentally kicked the tail-light of a police van. I’m not proud of that. I did apologise.’

Rose appears not to be one of those militant activist fanatics who is going to firebomb your garden shed because you like eating sausages, but she is determined to achieve Animal Rising’s stated aims of ending factory farming and turning the entire country vegetarian.

How realistic can that be, given that human beings are carnivores?

‘No, we are not, we are omnivores,’ she corrects. ‘And we can all survive and thrive on a plant-based diet.’

She is so focused that she doesn’t even mind that her activism has resulted in a criminal record that has a negative impact on her life.

It is unlikely, for example, that she will ever be able to travel to America, where her husband’s family are based. And should she ever want to adopt children, that would prove extremely difficult, too.

‘Well, I don’t have plans to have children – I’ve never really had the urge,’ she says. ‘And I can’t imagine loving human children more than I love James and Oliver. I love them so much! Just because I didn’t give birth to them and we’re from a different species, that’s not important.

‘I’m their mum and Wayne is their dad, and in future we only want to adopt non-human children. I honestly want to dedicate as much of my life as possible to helping animals.’

Which brings us back to Sandringham. ‘I mean, look at Sammy, Sunny and Sooty,’ she says. ‘In rescuing them, we literally saved three lives. We completely changed their world for them and I think that is worth it all. Yes, it has meant some disruption to my life, but that is OK.’

Yet what does this kind of performative, Instagram-friendly activism achieve and can Rose and Animal Rising really change the planet, one lamb at a time?

In any given spring there are 16 million to 20 million lambs in the UK, which puts Rose’s token gesture, smoked into the headlines and on to news bulletins by the royal connection, into clear perspective. ‘I’d love to rescue every single animal in the land but I can’t, it’s not practical,’ says Rose.

‘We try our best to raise awareness, which is of course why we chose King Charles’ lambs.’

On that spring day three years ago, just a few weeks after the King’s coronation, Rose – along with her Animal Rising colleagues Sarah Foy and Rosa Sharkey (both now 26) – climbed over an electric fence and into a field on the Sandringham estate.

An unknown driver in a getaway van waited on the roadside. At the time, the King was 400 miles away on an official visit to Northern Ireland, oblivious to what was going down in deepest Norfolk.

Wearing matching pink Animal Rising T-shirts, armed only with buckets of sheep nuts and the righteous zeal of revolutionaries, Rose & co believed themselves to be emancipators rather than common thieves.

They had previously made several recces to the site and now sat in the field for hours, building trust with the flock, bonding with the three friendliest lambs, enjoying the kumbaya vibe.

‘Sarah is the sheep whisperer, she was amazing,’ says Rose. When they eventually picked up their chosen trio of animals, the women were surprised at how scratchy the lambs’ wool was and how much each lamb weighed. ‘So heavy! We could only carry away one each.’

Did the babies bleat for their mothers as they were loaded into the van? Apparently not. The silence of the lambs proved to be their golden ticket on the Animal Rising freedom express.

Sheep are sentient beings and, whatever you may think about their methods, Animal Rising’s campaigns to improve animal welfare are not without merit.

Rose, who grew up in Harrogate, has an MSc in Animal Welfare Science, Ethics and Law from the University of Winchester.

This means she has a scientific understanding of sheep behaviour and must know that there is a strong bond between ewes and their lambs – one that is particularly marked in the Aberfield breed.

When the activists removed the lambs from the field they were still running with their mothers – one wonders where the peaceful Sanskrit ahimsa was to be found in this enforced separation.

‘The lambs were going to be taken away from their mothers soon enough, we knew that they were going to be sent to slaughter,’ says Rose.

‘It was literally a life-or-death situation. It was either be killed or be taken away to live a long and happy life.’

That is not strictly true. Within UK sheep production systems not all lambs are destined to be slaughtered, with about 4 million retained each year to become adult sheep. Yet on this point, as on so many others, Animal Rising are convinced the moral high ground is theirs, even when it comes to inconvenient facts or the iniquity of theft.

For if you take something that does not belong to you, even if you believe you are taking it to make a principled stance, surely that is still stealing?

‘No,’ says Rose. ‘Not if it is for honest reasons.’

So if you were taking King Charles’ Crown Jewels instead of King Charles’ lambs, would the same determinant still apply?

‘It depends on the context. Maybe someone had a very good reason for stealing the Crown Jewels,’ she says.

During the trial, the prosecuting barrister asked Rose – who defended herself – that if, for example, someone took her bicycle, would she consider that stealing?

It would depend on the context, she countered, using her ‘honest reasons’ argument again.

‘Are they stealing my bike because it’s an emergency and they need to get to hospital to see their dying grandmother?’ she wondered. If that were the case, one presumes the bike would be returned – but the authorities have never located Charles’ missing sheep, despite what Rose calls ‘a lot of pressure from the police’.

She still claims ignorance of the location of the refuge where the sheep now live, although she seems very cognisant of their progress and thinks that she may visit them soon, now that the trial is over.

She says: ‘Sheep have their own inner world and a preference to live and to love and have babies, and to nurture their young and to grow old and avoid suffering and death. Sammy, Sunny and Sooty have made friends with goats in the sanctuary.’

That’s nice.

‘They seem happy.’

How do you know when a sheep is happy?

‘I can’t say for definite what makes a sheep happy, but I want to give them the opportunity for happiness.’

While preparing this article, I spoke to three different animal welfare and animal behaviourist experts at leading UK universities. All have had skirmishes with animal activists in the past and all understandably declined to be named – but each had their own misgivings about these events.

‘There is a question of how well they could care for the lambs – my feeling is not as well as the lambs were being cared for already,’ said one. ‘Why ensure that the lambs live a long life if the activists are concerned about the impact of sheep on the environment? It does seem illogical,’ said another.

A third felt that the dignity of the sheep had been violated.

‘Sheep have given so much to mankind – milk, cheese, yogurt, wool, sheepskins.

‘They are one of the most important and useful domesticated species, and from the ram which Abraham sacrificed instead of his son Isaac to Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal, they have their place in human history.

‘I felt the activists, apart from anything else, indulged in questionable anthropomorphism by giving the lambs the names Sammy, Sunny and Sooty.’

I asked Rose why they had done so. ‘We called him Sooty because he looked like he had put his face in a bucket of coal. And then Sonny and Sammy because they began with an S,’ she says.

She fondly remembers holding them in her arms for ten minutes before they began their journey from the heritage crops and organic fields of Sandringham to pastures new and unknown.

‘I wanted to make sure they were calm. Then they went off and I felt relief because this was so clearly the right thing to do.’

In Rose Patterson’s crazy world of Squeaky Bean dinners, sheep nuts and thumb cuffs, being found guilty of stealing the King’s lambs was a blow, but she is not going to let it halt her progress.

When the verdict was read out in court, Sarah the amazing sheep whisperer felt like she had been ‘punched in the gut’, but Rose was more philosophical.

‘It was a risk but I genuinely thought I was doing the right thing and I’d do it all again tomorrow,’ she says.

In the meantime, Rose must get on with her self-appointed task of persuading British farmers and the British people to transition to plant-based systems and vegetarian diets.

‘Yeah, it’s super complex but I think it’s possible,’ she says. ‘I have my hopes. I mean, there is no point in doing this work if you think it’s impossible, right?’

Right.