Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Slaughter of Geronimo was justified says Eustice
ENVIRONMENT Secretary George Eustice defended the decision to euthanise Geronimo the alpaca after it twice tested positive for bovine TB, saying that farmers, including his own father, go through the same trauma as the alpaca’s owner, but “we have to maintain consistency in the fight against TB.”
The minister, who is a member of a long-established Cornish farming family, spoke about his own family’s experience with the “terrible” disease of bovine tuberculosis, as he justified the destruction of Geronimo, which attracted condemnation from celebrity animal rights campaigners.
Mr Eustice, who kept his job as Secretary of State at Defra, despite suggestions he was for the chop this week, said that his father had been “very distraught” to have to slaughter one of his show cows.
He said he believes it was the right decision to euthanise alpaca Geronimo, which lived on a farm in Wickwar, South Gloucestershire, but admitted it had been “difficult”.
He told LBC radio: “The important thing to recognise is that every week we have to remove and slaughter about 500 cattle who test positive. I know this particular owner was attached to Geronimo, but there are farmers up and down the country who suffer similar heartbreak every week. My own family, who have cattle, have lost show cattle, excellent cattle they wanted to show, through this terrible disease, and it is difficult but necessary.”
He added: “My family have a pedigree herd of South Devon cattle. They are wonderful, gentle animals, native to the Westcountry, but, yes, a few years ago we had an outbreak of TB and my father was very distraught because he lost one of the cows that he said was one of the best South Devon cows he had ever seen.”
Of Geronimo, he said there was a danger of a “false negative” emerging if vets continued to test the animal for bovine tuberculosis.
He told radio listeners : “These cases are always difficult, and I had looked at the Geronimo case three years ago, and a couple of other times since, actually. But the truth is he had tested positive for bovine TB using a test called the Emperplex test, which very rarely has false positives.
“The owner at that point said she was unsure about the result, would we give her a second test. We don’t really do that, but the vets, to do her a favour, said ‘OK, we’ll give you a second test’.
“That also came back positive, so she said ‘Well, now I want a third test’, and at that point the danger of just relentlessly testing is you will at some point get what is called a false negative, and that is that it will tell you it is clear when it is not.
“Difficult though it is, and I know she was very attached to Geronimo, we do have to maintain consistency in our fight against TB, and at post-mortem they did find TB-like lesions.”
Mr Eustice said the results of the post-mortem examination on Geronihave been shared with the animal’s owner, Helen Macdonald.
He said they showed the animal had atypical TB-like lesions, in the liver and in the lymph. “Not in the lungs, and I think on that basis she has claimed he didn’t have TB, but there were TB-like lesions,” he added.
He said scientists would not try to culture TB from the lesions to identify what strain of bovine TB it was.