What was claimed
A photo shows sheep dyed by a farmer in Scotland.
Our verdict
The photo has been edited, though farmers do sometimes dye their sheep for both practical and entertainment purposes.
Some farmers dye their sheep, but a photo of a neon flock has been edited
25 February 2021
A picture purporting to show sheep dyed a selection of neon colours by their farmer has been shared on Facebook.
The photo has been edited to make normal sheep look like they have been dyed, and the edited picture has been doing the rounds online for quite a while. The original photo appears under the Wikipedia entry for “sheep” and was taken in the US.
The post claims that the owner of the sheep is a farmer near Bathgate in Scotland, who’s been doing this since 2007 to “make people smile”. In 2007, the BBC did write about a farmer in Bathgate who had spray painted his 54 sheep red “for a bit of fun” but the image in the Facebook post is not of those sheep.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as altered because the photo has been edited to make the sheep look dyed.