Foot and Mouth Disease Widely Misunderstood
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My neighbor, a pleasant fellow whose good sense I respect, and my family swap manure from his beef cattle, which we turn into compost for our market garden, in return for the use of a few acres of our pasture for his manure producing cows. This spring he and I were visiting. Foot and mouth disease came up.
"For awhile there was a story going around that animal rights people wanted to infect cattle with the disease because they'd rather see them die from foot and mouth disease than from being killed at the slaughterhouse," my neighbor said.
Now, you try and unravel that statement. I grasped at one of its threads. Animals don't die from Foot and Mouth disease. I reported the statement, and the fact that animals don't die from foot and mouth disease, to friends over dinner. Their teen age son, a vegetarian, said, but don't the animals suffer terribly when their hooves dissolve?
Animals that contract Foot and Mouth disease have nasty lesions on their hooves and mouth. But their hooves stay intact.
Another friend said that she'd heard that other mammals, perhaps rodents, get the disease.
Only animals with cloven hooves, such as cattle, sheep, pigs, and deer, contract Foot and Mouth Disease.
One wonders how many television news reports, magazine and newspaper articles, and gigabytes of web data, have been dedicated to Hoof and Mouth Disease? And, inevitably, one wonders whether victims of bubonic plague, in centuries past, would have been better informed about the disease if they too had 500 television channels to choose from.
Neither bubonic plague nor Foot and Mouth Disease are to be taken lightly, however. Foot and Mouth Disease can have a terrible impact on the lives of livestock farmers and the food supply of a country. That is true not because there is any danger from eating meat from the affected cattle but because government control measures are so draconian.
The Minnesota Department of Agriculture http://www.mda.state.mn.us, a reliable source of information on the disease, has tried to enlist international travelers in preventing the spread of the disease to the United States. Here are their precautions for international travelers:
*Anyone traveling to Britain, France or other countries with FMD should avoid going to any farm, zoo or other animal facility in that country if possible;
*Anyone who does visit a farm, zoo or other animal facility in a country with FMD should avoid all farms, zoos and other animal facilities in America for seven days after returning;
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