Whats wrong with our farms?

last updated 8 January 2015

Great Britain

Foot-and-mouth disease has returned to Britain, said Magnus Linklater in The Times. Last week, two cows fell sick with the highly contagious disease at a farm in Guildford. Officials suspect the virus may have escaped from a nearby veterinary pharmaceutical lab. So far, more than 100 cattle have been slaughtered at the infected farm, and panic is starting to spread. Will we soon be facing a repeat of “the nightmare of 2001?” During that “insane period,” some 7 million farm animals—most of them healthy—were slaughtered in a desperate attempt to eradicate an epidemic of the dread disease. “Funeral pyres” heaped high with corpses “lit up the night air across the farmland of Britain.” The countryside was off-limits to walkers and hikers, and the tourism industry all but shut down.

And for what? said Johann Hari in The Independent. Simply to save the British beef export industry? That market employs fewer than 40,000 people and brings only $200 million in annual revenue. Besides, “almost none of that money is real profit,” since it springs from the direct subsidies “that we city dwellers hand to the countryside every year.” The tourism industry, by contrast, brings in more than $140 billion and employs nearly 2 million people. It is idiotic “to do terrible damage to tourism to save a titchy rural cottage industry with almost no net worth.” There’s a much easier way to prevent foot-and-mouth outbreaks: Vaccinate every animal. The beef industry opposes that option because vaccinated animals can’t be exported everywhere. Too bad. The wholesale slaughter of animals kills off tourism, and that’s a price we can’t pay.

Our animals shouldn’t be getting sick in the first place, said India Knight in the Sunday Times. Factory farming is to blame. Londoners love to believe that the countryside is dotted with “rosy-cheeked farmers’ wives” who go about “cuddling newborn lambs.” In fact, farms in Britain are either “small, poor, and forgotten” or “huge and terrifying.” Consider how a chicken is produced: Debeaked, declawed, smashed in a cage with a dozen others, covered in sores—such an animal “has known nothing but stomach-turning cruelty since it had the misfortune to hatch.” Yet we save our national outrage for fox hunting. “If people continue to display an appetite for meat that’s cheaper than some vegetables, they shouldn’t reel in horror when that meat and the way it is produced results in health scares.”