FOOT AND MOUTH DISEASE

[Stanley]

FOOT AND MOUTH DISEASE


25 February 2001

Just for once we are going to be topical! I’ve been watching the news stories about the present outbreak and I was asked the other day what it was like in 1967 when we had the last big outbreak. I was working for E A Drinkall and Sons at the time driving their cattle wagon and we were in the thick of it.
I worked out of West Marton for Richard Drinkall at Yew Tree Farm, West Marton, who was the eldest of the three Drinkall Brothers. He was a cattle dealer and a good man. Our business was buying high quality heifers and young cows in Scotland and selling them to the farmers all around here and further afield in Yorkshire and Lancashire. Richard had some very good customers, many of them retailed milk in the industrial towns and they could afford to buy really good beasts as they were getting a better profit. We bought their heifer calves off them and sold them to the rearers up in Scotland who were assured of a good price because Richard always tried to buy his own breeding back as he knew the quality.
Right, I’ll have to tear myself away from Richard, I could write about the cattle job for weeks! It was an interesting job and I met some wonderful men. Our business this week is Foot and Mouth disease. Anyone who has been concerned with cattle hates the very name because it means nothing but misery and trouble to everyone concerned and the cattle as well. In 1967 we had the most serious outbreak the country has seen in modern times. Farming was just about shut down but cattle still had to be moved and so we carried on throughout the whole disaster. The biggest impact on me was that every time I unloaded I had to muck out the box and scrub and disinfect it before I could load again. I got webbed feet from the water and industrial dermatitis from the strong disinfectants we were using.
It wasn’t long into the outbreak when supplies of disinfectant ran short, the same thing is happening now. Towards the end of the epidemic the Ministry of Agriculture issued an advice notice that said that the best disinfectant was a solution of ordinary washing soda, it was the most effective because they said the organism was very susceptible to anything that was alkaline. If anyone that reads this has hit this problem, ask your vet or ministry man whether soda will do and remind him of what they said in 1967. It was kinder to the hands and dispersed more quickly in the drains, strong disinfectants are expensive and bad for the environment.
Another matter that cropped up then was the question whether there was any need to slaughter. It will surprise me if it doesn’t rear its head again, because the fact is that the type of Foot and Mouth that affects the UK isn’t a killer disease. Left to themselves most cattle will recover from it in a couple of months but it is a big problem in economic terms purely because of the debilitating affects on condition, weight gain and milk yields. It also affects the export trade if it is endemic. A vaccine exists for it but since 1910 this country has pursued a policy of eradication by slaughter of all affected cattle. Personally, I think this is the right policy but it carries a penalty in that because our cattle and other susceptible animals are never exposed to the infection they have no resistance and so the disease spreads like wildfire.
A good parallel example is the fate of the Inuit people, the Eskimos. When they were first exposed to Western European diseases by contact with explorers they died like flies from the common cold which quickly led to complications because they had never been exposed to it. Our cattle are in the same situation.
Another modern trend which is exacerbating the present outbreak is the closure in the last few years of many of the small local slaughterhouses. One of the first facts that emerged from the present outbreak was that there isn’t a single slaughterhouse on the Isle of Wight which is why pigs had to be sent to Essex to be killed. This means that animals have to be transported far greater distances and with a greater chance of passing the infection on.
There is another consequence to this policy which isn’t anything to do with Foot and Mouth but which needs to be recognised. Long journeys by road are not a big problem for fit young beasts who are being properly handled and looked after but there is a world of difference between carrying cattle which have to be sold on the day after the journey and need to be in peak condition and carrying animals that aren’t your concern and are going to be killed on arrival anyway, this is human nature. Pigs in particular suffer terribly from this, they don’t travel well at all. An animal's worst enemy is another animal and anyone who works in a slaughterhouse will tell you that ‘casualties’ aren’t uncommon. By casualties they mean animals that have quite simply died of terror, but we call it stress.
In all the time I worked for Drinkalls I only lost one beast, a calf I had calved on the way down from Inverness, and I doubt if it would have survived even if we had been at home as it was a poor thing. My point is that the so-called ‘experts’ who advise the government on these matters aren’t necessarily experts at all. How many of them have brought 32 heavy in-calf cows out of Paisley lying-off sales and delivered them in good nick 200 miles down the country? I can tell you from my experience that those were the worst beasts of all to carry but we moved them successfully day after day each Spring from the lying off sales. The well-meaning animal rights activists who were blockading the ports a couple of years ago to stop veal calves being transported to the continent were barking up the wrong tree. They should have been picketing any slaughterhouse that had razor wire and spiked fencing round it. One of the design elements in these places is that nothing can be seen from the road, ask yourselves why?
Back to Foot and Mouth. Another problem which will have to be faced if this outbreak gets any bigger could come as a bit of a surprise. Not too long ago a friend of mine needed to buy a large quantity of railway sleepers for a job he had on. I got a shock when he told me that they had come from Poland as the UK is running out of wooden railway sleepers. They tell me that due to the efforts of Charlie Dimmock and Alan Titchmarsh, a good railway sleeper can fetch up to £25 at a DIY store!
Take it from me, if you ever have to burn a body, railway sleepers are the best fuel because they are pressure impregnated with creosote and burn fiercely. In 1967, thanks to Doctor Beeching and his rail closures, we had an abundance of cheap sleepers scattered all round the country and they were the ideal material for building large platforms which, with the addition of coal, were the funeral pyres for incinerating the carcasses of animals killed in the cull. I noted this morning that they were using straw bales and waste wood. I wouldn’t mind taking a small bet that there will be more roasted carcasses than incinerated ones but we will never get to hear about it. They’ll dig a big pit, shove everything in and cover it over.
Another thing that niggled me a bit was a report in the paper that the cattle are killed with ‘a rifle bolt’. Wrong, the only way you could kill anything with a ‘rifle bolt’ is make them eat it! What they actually mean is that they are killed with a captive bolt pistol. This is a small specialised hand gun that has been modified so that when a blank .22 cartridge is fired, it expels a spring loaded steel spike about four inches long. The pistol is actually placed on the beasts head and fired so there is no possibility of a miss when used by a skilled operator. I know most of my readers don’t like to think about death in any form but this is the most humane way of killing an animal. Death is instantaneous and if the job has to be done, this is the best way to do it so rest a bit easier, there is no cruelty.
There is one last aspect of this matter I’d like to mention. The effect on the farmers. Contrary to popular opinion, the vast majority of farmers actually like animals, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be working with them. The psychological effect of having your entire stock of beasts, most of which you have calved and reared, is enormous and I have seen how badly affected people can be by this. It’s even worse when it’s a pedigree herd which has taken perhaps 100 years to build up through careful selection and breeding, all that work is destroyed overnight. I remember one farmer in Scotland who told me that if his herd was slaughtered, not only his life’s work but that of his father and grandfather would be destroyed. As it happened, it never came to that, he was lucky, but he had to live with the possibility for months.
So my thoughts go out to the farmers and the poor beasts that get caught up in this. I have no problems with killing beasts that have had a good life and been properly looked after but wholesale slaughter because of Foot and Mouth upsets me. What upsets me even more are the ‘experts’ and ‘activists’ who have such an effect on the way the animal husbandry business is run and who, for the most part, have no direct experience or knowledge of the things they pontificate on. Thanks for listening to me. Normal historical service will be resumed next week!

25 February 2001