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Class War issue 81: Animal Farm
The scenes of carnage across Britain, with mounds of burning animals, has been constantly portrayed on our TV screens as some sort of cruel to be kind, stiff upper lip, spirit of the blitz policy, aimed at protecting animals. Nothing could be further from the truth. Profit, not animal welfare, is the sole motive for the mass culling.
We are rarely informed of it, and many people do not even know it, but the truth is that foot and mouth disease is not fatal to animals. Humans cannot catch it at all. Left to its own devices, the animal will recover, without even assistance from a vet.
Why then the slaughter of infected and even uninfected animals? While the animals have foot and mouth, they cannot be sold. The disease takes time to run its course and while it does it spreads amongst other animals in a way similar to flu. As animals cannot be sold profits collapse. To maintain profit the policy is to contain the epidemic via strict segregation and mass slaughter.
Immunisation to prevent foot and mouth is not only possible (something rarely stated on our TV screens in recent months), but common in many parts of the world. However, as there has been no major outbreak in Britain since 1967, our government and much of Europe has decided it is cheaper not to mass immunise animals but to stand the cost of mass slaughter if and when it breaks out. Needless to say it is not the government or the farmers that will meet the cost of this decision, but you and me, the taxpayer.
A second result of the outbreak has been a mass clamp down on movement. In some places military style exclusion zones are enforced with such rigidity we wonder if we risk being shot for challenging them. So called rights of way have been closed everywhere. If we have a 'right' but that 'right' can be taken away at the stroke of an official's pen, without consultation or consent, then the truth is we never had any such right in the first place. We were simply allowed a temporary privilege (in this case to walk on this green and pleasant land) until the powers that be deemed it inconvenient and took the privilege away. On a wider scale we have seen this happen in Northern Ireland in the past with the right to a jury trial removed and even in the 1970s imprisonment without trial.
Always question what the ruling class tells you. Especially the tales deemed to be common sense, accepted wisdom or "expert opinion".
Back to issue 81 contents
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