FIRST, some figures: 2.6 million animals slaughtered so far, of which a mere fraction, 40,000, were confirmed foot-and-mouth cases. According to The Daily Telegraph, the carcasses, laid end to end, would stretch from London to the Sahara desert.

Mind you, we have our own self-made deserts now the square miles of farmland emptied of animals. On holiday last week, I drove through two devastated areas Brough-Penrith and Keswick-Carlisle. The livestock wipeout brings home the tragedy.

The destruction behind it reflects badly on us all. And I do mean all. Only the threatened death of Phoenix the calf stirred sufficient public revulsion for the Government to abandon its mass-cull for that single animal. The similar fate of more than two-and-half million others has been viewed largely as a grim necessity. Not even the Gestapo-like seizure and slaughter of the five pet sheep barricaded into her home by a widow an operation that surely plumbed the depths of this appalling episode caused enough outrage to stop it. What has burned most fiercely on the pyres, and been irretrievably buried in those Belsen-like pits, is Britain's claim to be a nation of animal lovers.

What of those who have suffered collateral damage the people whose livelihoods have been undermined? Staying in Keswick, I witnessed the scale of the blow to tourism. Walking each morning from our holiday cottage to the paper shop, I passed guesthouse after guesthouse with no one at the neatly-set breakfast tables.

For anyone not wildly hungry to climb the fells a phase I have left behind it's possible to have a great time in the Lake District at the moment. Roads usually intolerable with traffic are eminently walkable. Knowing we would never have the opportunity again, my wife and I twice walked round Derwentwater. A cuckoo could be heard calling across the lake. We also had a most beautiful walk on minor roads in the damson-blossomed Winster valley.

Back in Keswick, we talked to a couple who had left Wigan last October to fulfil their dream of running a guesthouse. Now absolutely desperate, they are members of a grassroots body named Crisis in Cumbria which planned a mass trespass on the fells last Thursday. At the last minute it was called off, mainly because the authorities agreed to open a small wood near Keswick a pathetic sop. Since the trespass had the permission of the farmer, and would have been on an ungrazed fell, it should have gone ahead, perhaps with the trespassers wearing T-shirts emblazoned Vaccinate. As the local MP told the House of Commons, 40 vaccines are routinely in use in Britain. Why not the one for foot-and-mouth?

Over in Holland, Dr Simon Barteling, former head of the EC's foot-and-mouth planning team, a major figure in drawing up the change from vaccination to mass culling in 1991, said: "We never for a moment thought that, with an emergency on the scale of the one in Britain, it would not be right to return to vaccination."

So there you have it. There has been no need for this entire gruesome exercise, whose financial cost to the public you and me will top £2bn.

As Agriculture Minister Nick Brown recently admitted, the greatest barrier to vaccination now is the expected public resistance to the meat and milk of vaccinated animals. Of course, that resistance mirrors the success of the Government's and Maff's propaganda in demonising a relatively mild, preventable, treatable, disease.

Ah well, let's start laying up stores of sleepers now, and identifying geologically-sound burial sites for the next big outbreak. And if you're thinking of running a country guesthouse, forget it.

Published: 09/05/2001