Sheep heart photo goes viral for good cause

“What’s the saying about never working with children or animals?” laughs photography student and Wales Young Farmers’ Club member Carys Mair.


But Carys threw out the rulebook when she, together with friends and family – including toddler Alfie – and 120 sheep, created the photograph that spearheads this year’s Wales YFC’s charity fundraiser in aid of the British Heart Foundation (BHF).


Carys and co caught the sheep on camera forming a perfect heart symbol to launch the YFC 12 Peaks Challenge, appropriately enough on Valentine’s Day.


The first shoot took place in the hills of her uncle’s farm near Welshpool, Powys. The sheep obliged, gathering in a heart shape round their carefully laid out feed, but Carys wasn’t happy with the angle of her photograph: “I needed to be high up to get the perspective,” she says.


So it was back down to the farmyard to rearrange the feed troughs and the 120 ovine models, while Carys perched on a front-loader tractor bucket. Six hours later she had the shot she wanted and her Facebook post went viral. “I’m overwhelmed by the likes and comments the photograph has had from all over the world,” Carys says.


It’s all in aid of BHF Cymru’s No Time to Wait campaign, a Wales-wide appeal to get more people trained in emergency life-support skills and place defibrillators (life-saving machines that give the heart an electric shock in some cases of cardiac arrest) in rural areas.


Wales YFC Chairman Gwenno Griffiths wants her Chairman’s Challenge to put a defibrillator in each of the 12 YFC counties and at the Wales YFC Centre at Builth Wells in Powys. “Heart disease can strike anyone, any time,” she says. “Twenty seven thousand young people in the UK live with heart disease and 39 die a day in Wales because of it.”


At £1,500 for each defibrillator, fundraising of this magnitude might seem a mountain to climb. Gwenno is undaunted. She, her team of YFC walkers and their mascot dogs, Tiff and Taff, scaled their first summit, Sugarloaf Mountain in Gwent, in February. So just 10 more mountains to go before Gwenno finishes her Challenge on home ground, climbing Snowdon in September.


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