A momentary glimpse....

"it was interesting that I hadn’t come close to understanding the trauma these people were experiencing...” David King

Interesting use of an interestingly neutral adjective by the departing CSA, who, this article in the Times today reveals, wept during a play about foot and mouth seven years after his influence had carried out "a cull of millions of animals to stop the outbreak". Interesting that journalists still do not - apparently - understand what did and what did not "stop the outbreak".

As Dr Alex Donaldson's submission to the Lessons Learned Inquiry pointed out:

"....The epidemic had been in decline by the time of the introduction of the contiguous cull policy on 29 March. .."

It is interesting that the massive scale of contiguous slaughter, which involved 10,400 farms and at the very least 6·5 million livestock, was largely unnecessary. Fewer than 1500 of 2030 ‘infected premises’ that were tested in the lab were actually confirmed as being infected.

These are the statistics that are fading, helped on their way by that very human wish to airbrush out the unthinkable.

All the same, the policy, so heavily influenced by Sir David King, resulted in the unnecessary involvement of over 7200 premises (69 per cent of all premises affected) and the unnecessary slaughter of at least 3·35 million animals(52 per cent of all recorded slaughters),and an excess cost of at least £1700 million(62 per cent of the declared net cost to the UK taxpayer).(See Vet Record Aug 5 2006)

But it is Christmas. We do not want to remember the scenes of utter shambles, the terror and misery resulting in the grief that Sir David allowed himself to share, so interestingly and just for a brief moment, seven years on.

How much better to dwell instead on the gentle scenes of human and animal kindness that feature still - thank God - in so many Christmas cards.

Even so, let it never be forgotten that the Slaughter of the Innocents did take place - it still does and it still will - until some deeper awareness replaces the politics at the heart of animal disease control.

The mass terror of 2001 was not - the authors' eulogy notwithstanding - imposed for any necessary reason, needing the steely determination of someone resolutely deaf to - as the the Times article by Mark Henderson and Helen Rumbelow so interestingly puts it - "... the emotional pleas of protesters".

Hmmm. "Emotional"... Unlike "interesting", here is a word packed with sub text. These days, has not such an adjective become synonymous with "hysterical" - that push-button word, much used by a propaganda machine that ought to be thoroughly ashamed of itself? But this kind of shame has become out of place and out of date among those whose actions take so little heed of those upon whom they impact. So it is "interesting" to get a glimpse into the mind of one to whom emotional pleas are wholly irrelevant and certainly not, seven years on, any reason for self doubt or humility - but to whom, just for a moment, comes the sudden pricking of tears.

(See also warmwell blogspot: "Seven Pillars of Piffle")

No one will enter my farm to kill my animals...

Brave, admirable, doomed words.

"If the veterinary service does not show me in writing whose animals actually have this disease, no one will enter my farm to kill my animals,”

Farmers in Cyprus are tearful, angry and disbelieving of the nightmare into which they have been plunged. Brussels is telling them to kill their animals - they want to know which ones for why should they kill healthy animals? Brussels is telling them to comply with the rules - they want to know why they should. Brussels thinks that compensation will silence the outrage - but one farmer,fighting back tears during the House Agriculture Committee hearing on Monday, said his livestock were like his children:

"They offered me £150 for every adult sheep… and £20 for every lamb [to be culled]. I said to them, ‘I wouldn’t even accept £1,150.
Then we sat down and looked at another price estimate. I told them to get up and leave and not to come back. The next day they returned, and this time they didn’t even bother to talk to me or ask me to sign anything. They just went ahead and executed the animals.."

The Cyprus Mail reports that the head of the Veterinary Services, Charalambos Kakoyiannis, appears to be as appalled as the farmers.

"For better or worse, we are in the EU now. I sympathise with your cries of distress and I know you feel as if their animals are like members of your families".

"For better - for worse"? Trusting Cyprus entered willingly into that marriage of 2004. But after all the optimism of the wedding the EU mask drops to reveal something rather worse than a skull. The farmers have no power to resist. Blood-letting and grief has been forced upon them this week by political expediency, not by foot and mouth disease. Now that modern science has provided us with potent inactivated vaccines; now that technical ingenuity has given us the ability - on-site -to diagnose active virus within minutes rather than hours, there is no excuse for the kill first, ask afterwards policy. For what happened in the killing fields of Surrey there was no veterinary or scientific basis; there is none for what is happening under the autumn sun of Cyprus. Anyone who pretends otherwise is a charlatan. All that is lacking is political will.

Emergency vaccination has been used successfully right across the globe in recent years. It works. There has never been a single reported case in the field of an FMD vaccinated animal spreading disease. And the irony is that emergency vaccination is actually permitted by Brussels. But Brussels rules are in place to protect that talisman of protectionism, the status of being "FMD free without vaccination" - so governments will "consider" it and do nothing.

Fotis Fotiou, the Cypriot Agriculture Minister told the farmers that

"any notion that Brussels deliberately wanted to destroy the Cypriot livestock industry was fantastical."

Difficult to think of a more effective way had it been so.
Farmers in the UK are now looking at the destruction of their industry - not because of animal disease but because of the supposed cure for it:Zones and restrictions imposed on us by the EU and by a Ministry that will go to all lengths to enforce rules that are mad, bad, cruel, ignorant and senseless.

The battle for a humane animal health policy goes way beyond a fuzzy concern for animal welfare. It is a battle about personal control and responsibility being wrested away from us. The justification for the removal of our freedoms is - as always - that it is for our ultimate good. It is the ultimate cynicism of those high on the drug of power. This is a battle worth fighting.

Yet it is almost too painful. To report on the calamity unfolding in Cyprus and reading the words of the farmers bring back with such grim clarity the sense of desperation and trauma that the killing policy has brought to us in the past decade. It is a recurring nightmare. We feel physically sick. We want to turn away. We want to drown it out, forget it and stop all this. And that is precisely why we must go on.

(Painting by FMD Vaccination campaigner, John English - now sadly no longer with us. He was always much admired in the Forest of Dean for his love of pigs and cattle and his ability to catch a moment. The painting is a legend. It was with great sadness we heard of his recent and sudden death.)