I send this in regard to your question about slaughter being the only treatment.<br>Deborah<p> Published on Sunday, March 4, 2001 in the Independent / UK<br> Foot & Mouth Crisis<br> To Be Killed for Having Flu Is As Sick As It<br> Gets<br> by Joan Smith<br> <br> Isn't it time somebody stood up for animals? Up and down the country, cows, pigs and<br> sheep with the equivalent of a heavy cold, and others without symptoms that have been in<br> contact with the affected animals, are being slaughtered and burned on ghastly funeral<br> pyres. We have all seen pictures of the sky glowing a baleful red, while yet more animal<br> carcasses are silhouetted starkly over the pits of death. Yet the whole business makes as<br> much sense, in everything but economic terms, as putting down an entire primary school<br> class because a few of the children happen to have sore throats. <p> Foot and mouth is not a fatal disease. When government ministers, farmers and vets prefer<br> to shoot thousands of animals rather than wait a few weeks for them to recover from an<br> illness that does not pose a threat to human health, it is clear that something has gone<br> hideously wrong with our relationship to the non-human world. In this case the cause is<br> money, the fact that most modern farms are run, despite subsidies, on a tight budget that<br> does not allow for looking after sick animals or a delay in the date when they can be sent<br> for slaughter. <p> Farmers would say, I suppose, that most of these creatures are destined for the abattoir<br> anyway, so the cull merely brings forward what is inevitable. But the same cannot be said of<br> feral animals, the deer, badgers and wild boar that may be hunted and shot as a<br> consequence of the outbreak. What angers many people I have talked to in the past week<br> is the way in which the photographs of burning carcasses symbolise the fact that farming is<br> an industry, and a ruthless one that cares very little for animal welfare. <p> And yes, I accept that most of us prefer not to know what goes on in slaughterhouses. One<br> of the effects of the crisis has been to make me think about returning to a vegetarian diet,<br> not out of concern for my own health but because of the horrors that modern farming<br> imposes on animals, and I doubt whether I am alone in this. It also signals the need for an<br> urgent reconsideration of our responsibilities towards the non-human world. In recent<br> months, largely as a result of the debate over hunting with hounds, we have been subjected<br> to a barrage of hostile propaganda about animals, from foxes to domestic cats. We are told<br> about the damage foxes do to pheasants and chickens, and the number of rodents and<br> birds killed by our moggies when they go hunting at night. <p> There is no moral equivalence here, as the American philosopher Lori Gruen has pointed<br> out: "It would be nonsensical to hold a lion morally responsible for the death of a gnu." (As I<br> once explained to Clarissa Dickson Wright, a keen supporter of hunting, I expect human<br> beings to have a more sophisticated grasp of moral responsibility than a fox.) <p> You and I may have a duty to reduce the opportunities for predation of our domestic pets,<br> as people already do by law in Western Australia, where a curfew operates and all cats<br> have to wear collars with bells. But the natural behaviour of animals, which lack the capacity<br> for moral choice, does not in any way justify our mistreatment of them in return. <p> If you insist on arguing that it does, by the way, you should logically accept that some<br> humans who cannot make moral judgements, patients in a persistent vegetative state or the<br> severely demented, do not have rights either – and, presumably, are free to be<br> experimented on for medical research. <p> Most people rightly find this kind of reasoning unacceptable, without recognising that we live<br> in a myopically anthropocentric culture. What I found astonishing about the Alder Hey organ<br> scandal was the assumption that tissue from dead humans is too precious to be used for<br> research, even to benefit people with debilitating diseases, while experiments on live<br> animals are perfectly OK. <p> All the evidence shows that the most destructive predator on earth is not the fox or the<br> domestic cat, nor even the tigers whose natural habitat shrinks alarmingly every year. It is<br> the human race, whose pitiless exploitation of other species diminishes our claim to belong<br> to a higher moral order. (Even other primates such as chimpanzees and bonobos, which<br> share almost 99 per cent of our genes, have not been spared.) <p> Only in a twisted universe would mildly sick farm animals find themselves rounded up for<br> premature slaughter, as is currently happening in Britain. That, rather than the economic<br> plight of farmers, is what the grim policy of mass destruction confirms to many of us today. <p> © 2001 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd.<p><br>
<br>
<br><hr size=4 width=75%><p>
[email protected]
