2001 – Foot-and-Mouth Disease Teaches Country to Fear the Countryside

Britain Burns Its Livestock and Its Tourist Industry Simultaneously

Foot-and-Mouth Disease Teaches Country to Fear the Countryside

Britain Burns Its Livestock and Its Tourist Industry Simultaneously

In February 2001, foot-and-mouth disease was identified at an abattoir in Essex, and Britain began the most severe agricultural crisis since BSE — a crisis that would result in the slaughter of approximately ten million animals, the closure of the countryside to walkers and tourists for months, the postponement of a general election, and the production of images so desolate and so specific to the English rural landscape that they entered the national visual memory as the defining images of the year.

The images were of pyres. Funeral pyres of cattle and sheep, burning in the fields of Cumbria and Devon and across the upland farming areas of Britain, the smoke rising in columns visible from miles away, the scale of the slaughter so large that the disposal of the carcasses became its own logistical crisis. The pyres were the visual expression of a policy — contiguous culling, the slaughter of animals on farms adjacent to infected premises whether or not they showed symptoms — that was scientifically controversial, operationally brutal, and politically the only available response to a disease spreading faster than the vaccination programmes that might have contained it could be deployed.

Ten million animals. The number requires contemplation. These were not units of agricultural production. They were livestock — animals that farmers had bred, reared, named in some cases, and that the foot-and-mouth policy required to be killed and burned in circumstances that combined the urgency of disease control with the intimacy of agricultural life in ways that the government’s communications could not sanitise and that the farming communities of Britain absorbed with the stoicism of people who had no choice but to absorb it.

The Disease and the Decisions

The 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak was traced to a pig farm in Northumberland where pigs had been fed inadequately heat-treated catering waste — a practice that was legal but that the outbreak demonstrated was a biosecurity risk of the first order when the catering waste in question contained imported meat products from regions where foot-and-mouth was endemic. By the time the outbreak was confirmed at the Essex abattoir on 20 February, infected animals had already been moved around the country through normal commercial channels, distributing the disease across a network of farms and markets that the tracing effort would spend months mapping.

Nick Brown, the Agriculture Minister, faced the specific difficulty of managing a disease that moved faster than the bureaucratic response could keep pace with, using a culling policy that was the standard British response to foot-and-mouth but that had never been applied to an outbreak of this geographic scale. The contiguous cull — slaughtering all animals within three kilometres of a confirmed case — was the scientific advice; the scientific advice was contested by veterinary experts who argued that vaccination was both more humane and more effective; and the debate between culling and vaccination was conducted simultaneously with the cull itself, which was not the ideal conditions for either scientific deliberation or effective crisis management.

The EU’s position — that Britain’s foot-and-mouth status precluded export of British livestock and meat products — added the economic dimension to the human and animal welfare ones. The farming industry was losing income from the culled animals, from the movement restrictions that prevented normal agricultural commerce, and from the export ban that removed access to European markets. The compensation payments were substantial; the administrative machinery for processing them was not initially adequate to the scale of the crisis.

The Countryside Closes: Tourism’s Lost Season

The closure of footpaths, public rights of way, and access land across the British countryside produced a secondary economic crisis in the rural tourism industry that sat alongside the agricultural crisis and compounded it for the communities — particularly in the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales, Dartmoor, and the other upland areas where foot-and-mouth was concentrated — whose economies depended on walkers, holidaymakers, and the general principle that the British countryside was accessible to the British public.

The tourism losses were estimated at approximately £5 billion — a figure that exceeded the direct agricultural losses and that fell on businesses — hotels, pubs, outdoor equipment shops, visitor attractions — that were not directly affected by the disease and were not eligible for the agricultural compensation schemes but that had their operating season eliminated by the access restrictions that disease control required. The Lake District’s emptied car parks. The closed footpaths on Dartmoor. The shuttered tearooms along the Pennine Way. These were the tourism crisis’s visual equivalent of the pyres — less dramatic, equally bleak, and affecting a wider range of livelihoods.

The Election That Almost Wasn’t

The 2001 general election had been expected in May — Blair’s government was approaching the end of its first term with poll ratings that, while diminished from the extraordinary heights of 1997, were comfortably positive, and May was the traditional spring election date. The foot-and-mouth crisis complicated the calculation, because elections require the mobilisation of voters through canvassing and physical campaigning in communities that were living through an agricultural emergency, and the image of politicians campaigning in the countryside while farmers were burning their herds was not an image that any party’s strategists welcomed.

Blair delayed the election from May to June 2001 — a delay that required the agreement of the local government elections that had been scheduled for May to be postponed simultaneously, and that produced from the opposition the argument that Blair was using a national crisis for electoral calculation, which was true but was also what any Prime Minister would have done in the same circumstances, which did not prevent it from being true.

The election was held on 7 June 2001. Labour won with a majority of 167 — the second consecutive landslide, albeit slightly smaller than the first, and the first time Labour had won two successive full terms since the party’s creation. The foot-and-mouth outbreak had not cost Blair his majority. It had cost rural Britain approximately ten million animals and five billion pounds in tourism revenue, both of which were rather more significant in their immediate human consequences than the electoral arithmetic.

The Pyres and What They Meant

The funeral pyres of 2001 produced a visual record that belongs in the category of national trauma — images that encode a specific moment of collective suffering in a form that does not diminish with repetition. The photographs of Cumbrian hillsides with burning cattle. The accounts from farmers who had spent their lives building their herds and watched them destroyed in days. The veterinary surgeons working exhausting schedules under conditions of clinical and emotional stress that the job specification had not prepared them for. These were the human texture of the crisis behind the statistics.

The Anderson Inquiry into the 2001 outbreak — one of several post-crisis investigations — concluded that the disease had been exacerbated by structural weaknesses in the surveillance and response systems, that the contiguous cull had been deployed too broadly, and that the vaccination option should have been considered earlier. The recommendations produced improvements in biosecurity regulation, in contingency planning, and in the legal framework governing the feeding of catering waste to livestock. These improvements are real. They are invisible. They are the achievements of crisis management that succeeds in preventing the next crisis rather than resolving the current one, which is the least celebrated form of public policy success.

The countryside reopened. The pyres were extinguished. The tourism season that had been lost was not recovered. The farmers who had lost their herds rebuilt, with the compensation payments and the specific resilience of agricultural communities that have survived setbacks before and understand that the alternative to rebuilding is the end of something they are not prepared to end. Britain had feared the countryside for a season. The countryside, as it always does, recovered and invited the country back in.

Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!

Foot-and-mouth disease was confirmed at an Essex abattoir on 20 February 2001, traced to a pig farm in Northumberland where pigs had been fed inadequately heat-treated catering waste. Approximately ten million animals were slaughtered during the outbreak, with disposal through pyres and mass burial. Tourism losses were estimated at £5 billion. Blair postponed the general election from May to June 2001; Labour won on 7 June with a majority of 167 seats. The contiguous cull policy — slaughtering animals on farms adjacent to infected premises — was the primary disease control strategy and remained controversial throughout the outbreak. The Anderson Inquiry and other post-crisis investigations recommended improvements to biosecurity regulation and contingency planning. Britain was declared free of foot-and-mouth disease in January 2002.

ORIGINALY PUBLISHED: 20 February 2001 (London, UK)

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]