Fields of Fire - In memory of the millions of animals destroyed by the ‘cure’ for Foot and Mouth Disease, 2001

This is quite long, a whole book on a website. My interest in it particularly is to find a counter balance to the propaganda that our Vermont State Vet and his crack team in the Vermont Agency of Agriculture put forth during the public hearings about premises registration last year.

I have no doubt that should a rogue notion about AI or FMD come to the surface in the USDA, this is exactly what will happen on our shores.

The following paragraph is from the Introduction:

It should be made clear that, from the start, it was an economic and political decision to cull all the animals, and not a scientific one. In an ideal world, foot and mouth disease would have been allowed to run through the herds and flocks to build up immunity, with relevant treatment and culling only in cases where animals were suffering badly. As a compromise, a combination of vaccinating and allowing the disease to maintain a presence could have been used – or else, perhaps the more popular choice, culling infected animals and ring vaccinating in each relevant area. If this had been done at the start, things would have been back to normal long ago and we would not now be seeing the destruction of farming families, empty fields, rural industries in ruins, pollution of our land through funeral pyres and burial pits – and the complete devastation of our beloved countryside.

Wake up.