Mad Cows or Mad People?
An article commissioned by The Vietnam News in 1996
and rejected by the editor
who feared that it might offend the British
The proverbially merry month of May was a mad one in the UK this year in the wake of the BSE scare.
Pandemonium reigned in farms and slaughterhouses as the culling started, with no one quite sure how many cattle were to be killed or how to go about it. There were no takers though for a solution worthy of Heath Robinson, proposed in a letter to a Cambodian newspaper and quoted in the Guardian. The problem, suggested the writer, could be solved by shipping all the doomed cattle out to Cambodia and herding them across the minefields there, thus ridding both countries of their problems in one fell swoop.
On May 2, in the midst of intense media speculation about victims of a new strain of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the human form of BSE, the Wimpy fast food chain resumed the use of home-produced beef in a move approved by the Prime Minister. They were acting, they said, in response to overwhelming consumer demand.
Fortunately for the faint-hearted, the more cautious Macdonald's and Burger King announced that they would continue to use imported beef.
No such pusillanimity for Chancellor Kohl, however. Despite his country's staunch backing of the European ban on British beef, he unconcernedly tucked into a plateful of the stuff at the dining table of John Major in Downing Street.
In the general brouhaha a hair-raising news item reported in the Independent on Sunday on May 5 went largely unnoticed. The Government, it appeared, was proposing to allow dust from cement kiln chimneys to be used as a binding agent for animal feed, regardless of the fact that such dust is believed to contain highly toxic waste. The Environment Agency blithely justified the proposal on the grounds that the practice has been adopted in other countries - with what consequences we know not.
Around the same time, British trade commissioner Sir Leon Brittan, on a visit to China, found himself in the ignominious position of having to announce that the European Commission - which had been resolutely turning a deaf ear to Britain's pleas for help in its current difficulties - had decided to grant $1 million for research into improving the meat and milk yields of Chinese water buffaloes.
In the middle of the month the supermarket chain Asda declared that they were banning all imported beef because, said a spokesman, "British beef is the best and safest beef in the world."
More or less simultaneously, a vet, clambering into a skip filled with offal in order to inspect it for alimentary correctness before it was turned into animal feed, discovered two potentially disease-bearing spinal cords which had been tossed in by a careless slaughterhouse worker.
Undeterred by such unhygienic practice, President Chirac, in a continuing spirit of entente cordiale, gamely swallowed the beef Wellington patriotically served to him by the Queen at Buckingham Palace. Other Frenchmen were reacting in a more alarmist fashion though, with the manufacturers of the well-known cheese La Vache Qui Rit even being rumoured to have given the laughing cow of their label a more sober countenance to avoid the notion that it was deranged.
Meanwhile, in New York another form of bovine madness was manifesting itself in the shape of an exhibition by British artist Damien Hirst whose own idiosyncratic genre is the arrangement of bits of dead animals in tanks. Noted works have included a pair of copulating cattle and a cow's severed head being eaten by maggots. Unsurprisingly, on this occasion the American authorities had viewed with concern Hirst's intention of bringing a number of chopped up cows into the country but had allowed themselves to be convinced by his assurances that the formaldehyde in which they were displayed would effectively prevent any spread of the dread disease.
One wonders at Hirst's choice of title for one of his butchered exhibits - "Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything". It could perhaps more appropriately be adopted as a mantra by Britain's hapless dairy farmers to enable them to arrive at a more philosophical view of their plight.
Pandemonium reigned in farms and slaughterhouses as the culling started, with no one quite sure how many cattle were to be killed or how to go about it. There were no takers though for a solution worthy of Heath Robinson, proposed in a letter to a Cambodian newspaper and quoted in the Guardian. The problem, suggested the writer, could be solved by shipping all the doomed cattle out to Cambodia and herding them across the minefields there, thus ridding both countries of their problems in one fell swoop.
On May 2, in the midst of intense media speculation about victims of a new strain of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the human form of BSE, the Wimpy fast food chain resumed the use of home-produced beef in a move approved by the Prime Minister. They were acting, they said, in response to overwhelming consumer demand.
Fortunately for the faint-hearted, the more cautious Macdonald's and Burger King announced that they would continue to use imported beef.
No such pusillanimity for Chancellor Kohl, however. Despite his country's staunch backing of the European ban on British beef, he unconcernedly tucked into a plateful of the stuff at the dining table of John Major in Downing Street.
In the general brouhaha a hair-raising news item reported in the Independent on Sunday on May 5 went largely unnoticed. The Government, it appeared, was proposing to allow dust from cement kiln chimneys to be used as a binding agent for animal feed, regardless of the fact that such dust is believed to contain highly toxic waste. The Environment Agency blithely justified the proposal on the grounds that the practice has been adopted in other countries - with what consequences we know not.
Around the same time, British trade commissioner Sir Leon Brittan, on a visit to China, found himself in the ignominious position of having to announce that the European Commission - which had been resolutely turning a deaf ear to Britain's pleas for help in its current difficulties - had decided to grant $1 million for research into improving the meat and milk yields of Chinese water buffaloes.
In the middle of the month the supermarket chain Asda declared that they were banning all imported beef because, said a spokesman, "British beef is the best and safest beef in the world."
More or less simultaneously, a vet, clambering into a skip filled with offal in order to inspect it for alimentary correctness before it was turned into animal feed, discovered two potentially disease-bearing spinal cords which had been tossed in by a careless slaughterhouse worker.
Undeterred by such unhygienic practice, President Chirac, in a continuing spirit of entente cordiale, gamely swallowed the beef Wellington patriotically served to him by the Queen at Buckingham Palace. Other Frenchmen were reacting in a more alarmist fashion though, with the manufacturers of the well-known cheese La Vache Qui Rit even being rumoured to have given the laughing cow of their label a more sober countenance to avoid the notion that it was deranged.
Meanwhile, in New York another form of bovine madness was manifesting itself in the shape of an exhibition by British artist Damien Hirst whose own idiosyncratic genre is the arrangement of bits of dead animals in tanks. Noted works have included a pair of copulating cattle and a cow's severed head being eaten by maggots. Unsurprisingly, on this occasion the American authorities had viewed with concern Hirst's intention of bringing a number of chopped up cows into the country but had allowed themselves to be convinced by his assurances that the formaldehyde in which they were displayed would effectively prevent any spread of the dread disease.
One wonders at Hirst's choice of title for one of his butchered exhibits - "Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything". It could perhaps more appropriately be adopted as a mantra by Britain's hapless dairy farmers to enable them to arrive at a more philosophical view of their plight.
