Cow perving as a leisure activity. Once a celebration of the people of the land and how they sustain our city, the Royal Easter Show is now little more than a theme park for its urban visitors. The fact is, most of us don't really want to know where our food comes from. And, by that action, we have abnegated our collective responsibility to farmers, the primary producers who keep us all alive - and also to ourselves. The latest study might have concluded that mad cow disease came from a wildlife park antelope, rather than the sheep corpses, but, either way, the infected beast was ground up with other animal carcasses and made into feed for cattle.
Cows are, of course, fundamentally vegetarian.
But feeding them dead animals is cheaper and quicker than putting them out in pastures to grow naturally. Illegally imported infected meat was bought cheap by a restaurant in the north of England, which sold kitchen scraps to a piggery for feed. Infected animals from that farm were then driven 400 kilometres across Britain, to Essex, for slaughter, distributing the airborne virus along the way. A few bigger slaughterhouses do better business than lots of local ones. To prevent these disastrous outcomes of agri-business, it's up to us, the consumers, to ask questions about food production.