End of the road?

 

We wrote of a black alpaca called Geronimo   in a posting in 2018.

Imported from New Zealand, into a UK TB hotspot, the animal subsequently tested positive for the disease and Defra's death notice was served.

After almost four years, some big money spent and several court appeals later, the animal is still alive and is due for  destruction  this week. 

The Sun, carrying the story on the link above, now puts the animal's owner in the firing line, as she has vowed 'to take the bullet' meant for her alpaca. 

It's probably worth mentioning that the number of cattle subject to Deathrow's paperwork in those four years, has exceeded 40,000 in each of the last three years. A peak in  2018, can be viewed on this link when 44,654 animals were compulsorily slaughtered after failing either the skin test or the notorious gamma ifn blood test.  A cumulative total of 130,113 cattle were condemned 2018 - 2020.

We also discovered some years ago that Defra were massaging  figures for camelid casualties of the zoonotic tuberculosis epidemic, now entrenched in the wildlife of GB. While individual cattle deaths were recorded, with alpacas, numbers published were restricted to a single group or herd. And even included herds which had had contact or were 'tethered' to the initial outbreak.  

We have been unable to ascertain whether this is still the case. 

But this is what tuberculosis in an infected alpaca looks like at post mortem.

Edit update:

There is of course another  ante mortem test for camelids, one which many people will now be familiar with after 17 months of covid. And that is PCR.  (Geronimo's owner is criticising the test, we understand)

In 2013, it was pretty obvious that trying to shoe-horn other mammals into the bovine test scenario was not going to work, and the owners of alpacas were particularly hard hit. So a group decided to self fund a Proof of Concept   study into whether PCR would be a more appropriate test  for these animals.

It worked, just as the PCR test for infected badgers  worked, when Owen Paterson's department threw £742,000  to Liz Wellington at Warwick University to develop her test to identify infected badger setts.

Sadly for reasons known only to themselves, neither test was accepted by the British Alpaca Society or Defra whose single collective brain cell is still in denial for camelids and badgers - if not for cattle..