Now read on. Somewhere in England there may indeed be a smocked farmer chewing a grass stalk at his gate, his bonneted wife sweeping her doorstep with a besom, roses round their cottage door, their children counting ducklings on the pond. Somewhere there may even be a farmer who has dug such a pond, whose chickens range and cluck about his feet, who has planted hedgerows to shelter finches and tomtits, and who, taking an ancestral view of his land, has set saplings in a copse to shade the herds and flocks of his descendants. But this is a farmer as unaware of current trends in agriculture as was the Sleeping Beauty of the wickedness of godmothers. Husbandry of the land and the welfare of farm animals have been abandoned for production, profit and the cheap supermarket food that seduces us with 20 per cent more and buy one, get one free.
Kindness costs money.
We should slaughter no more animals on the altar of an agribusiness that would die tomorrow were it not for subsidies and its indecently symbiotic relation-ship with supermarkets, an agribusiness that is a cruel and brutal trade, morally indefensible but buttressed by the Government, its value to the rest of us a mere trifle compared with tourism. If, as a priority, we slaughter recovered and vaccinated animals for food, no more funeral pyres will pollute the air, no more burial pits the water courses, carcasses will no longer lie putrefying in the fields, rare breeds will not be made extinct, vast sums will not have to be disbursed in compensation, and the problem of this outbreak and all others will be solved - we shall eat our way through them. Let us not be too sentimental about farm animals - their purpose is to produce progeny and milk, and then be eaten. Pretty baa-lambs are born to be chops, calves to be steaks and Ch teaubriands, piglets to be deconstructed into bacon rashers, ducklings to be canard l'orange and chicks to be McNuggets. If, for the sake of tourism and our own Beatrix Potter visions of the country, we want our landscapes to look as they did and be peopled as they were two centuries ago, then we must be less greedy for the flesh of animals and more prepared to pay a proper price for it.