Mr. John Condon:

We used to get funding from the Department. Some 15 or 20 years ago, we used to get funding every time we rounded up stray horses. We could submit the invoices for that to the Department of agriculture and we were 100% recouped. That made it easy to enforce. Following the downturn, however, and what might be described as an epidemic of stray horses, as the number of such horses and the number of invoices increased, the Department of agriculture gradually reduced what it was recouping to local authorities. That caused a problem because it meant that money had to come out of something else in order to do this. Thankfully, that problem has receded because the numbers we are currently dealing with are not as drastic as they were ten or 15 years ago.