Comment: We are too sentimental about our animals | UK news | The Observer

07/08/11 02.29

A cow is just a cow

We get too sentimental about our animals, whether they are footand-mouth infected cattle or wild marmosets, says Cristina Odone Special report: Foot and mouth disease
The Observer, Sunday 4 March 2001 05.20 GMT

Animals exist for us. Farmers understand this, which is why whenever they are pushed in front of a mike for a quote on their most recent plight, they describe the spread of foot and mouth as a farming crisis, a tragedy that is blighting human communities. Animals don't get a look in. They are an economic, not an emotional, investment, and now that their value as foodstuff has been destroyed - who among us wants to eat a desiccated chop from an emaciated animal? - the farmers know what to do: slaughter the infected animals and wait for compensation. They see no intrinsic value in the four-legged critters. Even though foot and mouth is not a life threatening disease (just a cattle form of flu), the farmers are matter of fact about killing off their animals when they don't weigh enough to bring in a healthy profit. They see no reason to spare them - even if the government allowed them to - once they've become useless; they're just a meal ticket. Indeed, this unsentimental view of sheep and cows explains why we have an outbreak of disease in the first place. When you see livestock as your livelihood you don't give a toss about their quality of life. If you did, you wouldn't opt for the kind of intensive farming that packs animals in cramped quarters or asphyxiating battery sheds, stuffs them with unnatural feeds, inject them with hormones. The farmer views these conditions not as cruel but as cost-effective. Yet the vast majority of Britons, the 90 per cent plus who live outside the farming community, describe the fate of farm animals in Holocaust terms. The talk is of funeral pyres and barbaric slaughter and a Schindler's List of the few marked for survival. It is the usual hyperbole the British go in for when they talk of four-legged, fanged or furred beings. Ever since it became primarily an industrialised, rather than agricultural, country, Britain has lost all perspective on animals. In France and Italy, where agriculture still employs a sizable proportion of the population, and plays a significant role in the economy, a farmer is a pivotal figure and a sheep is just a sheep. But in a Britain where the farmer and his animals are a rare sighting, many believe the farmer is in reality a BBC producer with a second home in Shropshire, a hobby farmer who waxes lyrical about his organic turnips and the glossy pigs that feed on them. His animals are not a means of livelihood, but essential figures in the bucolic landscape that is the urbanite's interpretation of rural England. This attitude has turned the beasts of burden that from Biblical times were there for our service and our stomach into creatures indistinguishable from ourselves. Urban dwellers whose encounters with the animal kingdom are limited to a squirrel in the park or a fat pigeon in the square, are equally ignorant of the farm animal's habits and the wild animal's haunts. And so they invest these mysterious little beings with a Walt Disney sentimentality that depicts them as soft cuddly and unfailingly benevolent. There
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Comment: We are too sentimental about our animals | UK news | The Observer

07/08/11 02.29

is no room in this fantasia of fauna for the fox that - shock horror - eats the rabbit or the mink that kills the water vole. To them nature is not Blake's vision of red in tooth and claw, but pretty in pink, a nursery mural rather than a feral landscape. This silly anthropomorphism turns dangerous when it turns the fox into the Anne Frank of the countryside - hiding from the uniformed fascist hunters; and the lamb transported across the channel in a cattle truck into a victim of ethnic cleansing. Gross distortions like these belittle human dignity and suffering, and defile the memory of victims of war, violence and disasters. The smoke and smell of the burning carcasses of diseased cattle may be very similar to the funeral pyres that immolate the remains of the Gujarat earthquake victims - but there is no moral equivalence. To think that there is betrays bankrupt ethics that regard man as no better than sheep. When Britain was a God-fearing country, this would have been blasphemy. We were taught that God made all creatures - but only man in his image. In the divine order, man with soul ranked well above animal without. Now we've ditched God, we've lost this hierarchy; every living being is value free. The farmer's plight is no worse than his calf's, his rights no greater. Once you accept this blurring of the species, you follow a ridiculous, if not downright wicked, logic. One animal sentimentalist of my acquaintance toured India for three weeks and the only charitable donation he made during the entire trip was to a donkey sanctuary. The dumb, grey beasties looked so vulnerable, he tearfully explained to me, in the middle of a market place teeming with starving beggars, legless lepers and sunken eyed children. I remember, too, going with some friends to see Gorillas in the Mist in London. In one scene, a gorilla's paw is cut off so that the evil hunter may sell it on as an ashtray. One of the women started bawling in the darkened room, her sobs hysterical and piercing as she indulged in a bleeding-heart exhibitionism that no brutal footage about Bosnia or Rwanda had ever triggered. But to erase the distinction between man and beast can prove more damaging than this show of insensitivity; it can place lives at risk. Inflate the value of animal life, and you won't sacrifice a dog for a child. This kind of wrong-headed prioritising is already causing damage. Scientists involved in animal experimentation know that their lab work on mice, beagle or marmoset may save millions of lives - or at least alleviate their suffering. Yet they must work in bunker-style conditions and live in fear of attacks from animal rights activists like the one that left Brian Cass of Huntingdon Life Sciences semiconscious. I claim an interest in animal experimentation. My half-brother, Lorenzo, suffers from a rare neurological disorder called adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD). His only hope lies in a series of experiments being conducted in hidden locations throughout Britain and the US. If someone you love is fighting for his life and owes his survival to animal experiments, you have no doubt that research scientists must continue their work unmolested by terrorists who, as others have pointed out, have in all likelihood, at some point, benefited from a drug at one time tested on animals. To witness Lorenzo's fate and then confront a placard-waving mob outside the laboratory where men and women are working to find the key to his condition, is to gag with bitterness. Yes, I feel uneasy about the ordeals that lab animals suffer - being shaved for x-rays, having a catheter introduced into their throat, being force-fed. But if these procedures lead to a cure for even one child, I have no doubt that this suffering is necessary. There is nothing like watching someone you love suffer, to convince you of the difference between a child's torment and a puppy's or a calf's.
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Comment: We are too sentimental about our animals | UK news | The Observer

07/08/11 02.29

There is a hierarchy of beings, and we humans stand at the top. Our first allegiance must be to one another; this calls for a challenge to the universe we have devised, wherein a farmer's ruin is of no greater consequence than an animal's killing; and a child's health of no greater value than a marmoset's. Cristina Odone is deputy editor of the New Statesman Related articles Comment: Foot and mouth; not many voters lost Comment: Sacrifices on the altar of cheap food Comment: Paying the price for cheaper food Around the country - foot and mouth latest Disease suspected on Continent Fear grows in plague village Ireland put under plague siege Law to break supermarkets' grip on farmers Today we burn the past. How can the future be different? Who's to blame? Graphics Map of confirmed cases so far Computerised image of the virus Photo gallery The story in pictures Talk about it Wh at do you think? Useful links Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food MAFF information and factsheets EU legislation on the disease Latest news from the NFU Meat and livestock commission National Pig Association World organisation for animal health: foot and mouth disease

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