In the Veterinary Record well known political vet, Dick Sibley, a pal of arch badgerist, Dr. Brian May, writes of government's handling of the current Covid 19 pandemic :
If this was an animal disease outbreak, with similar infectivity, economic connotations and variable clinical outcomes, vets would apply the four pillars of disease control to manage it: biosecurity, biocontainment, surveillance and resilience.
The key to managing Covid-19, if it were a disease in a veterinary context, would be to apply the key four pillars of control concurrently.
and:
Livestock vets have experience of successfully managing national disease outbreaks. They understand the confounding factors that are important when determining strategies for delivering disease prevention and control on a major scale, including health, welfare, economics and political palatability: issues that are perplexing current policymakers.
Really? And he can say that with a straight face?
Political vets like Sibley, hand in hand with political scientists such as Bourne and co., have presided in our lifetimes over the most horrendous slaughter of animals and poultry, in the attempt to stop various zoonotic and non zoonotic diseases. From salmonella in hens, through BSE, the unforgivable carnage-by-computer during FMD and of course, all the while rumbling in the background was that veterinary opportunity - zoonotic tuberculosis.
Defra stats show that from 2001 - 2019, with the quiet compliance of Sibley and many other livestock vets, GB slaughtered 612,150 cattle. The annual cull of reactors and 2x inconclusives, gamma positives etc. now regularly overtaking our graph of 2008, and totalling over 44,000 per year in Great Britain.
So how do Sibley's pillars of disease control stack up with leaving a wildlife reservoir hooching with infection to run freely across our farms, while testing and shooting anything that has the misfortune to fall over the detritis it leaves behind? Shoot the big black and white animal but leave the small one, because the public (and Brian May) love it?
From a paper published earlier this year, the contrast between our tested sentinel cattle and infected badgers is quantified thus:
In the UK, at any one time, there are 29,871 cattle infected with TB compared with 91,643 TB infected badgers. Three times as many badgers with TB as cattle, in other words.This is of course exacerbated by our having the largest badger numbers per sq km in Europe. The median European badger density is 0.29 - 0.55 per sq km. In the British Isles, it is 4.3 - 5.4 although in some areas it is over 30 per sq km.
More on just how well Defra / APHA and Mr Sibley's cohorts have managed the disease we call 'zoonotic tuberculosis' can be found in this link
And in our opinion, none come out smelling very sweetly, let alone criticising government - their paymaster - for its handling of Covid 19.
There is an old saying concerning a hole and a shovel, and when, with numbers of tested dead cattle rocketing to over 44,000 per year, perhaps it's time to throw away the shovel.
