PHOENIX: THE SURVIVOR

Phoenix the calf, who survived the foot-and-mouth cull

PHOENIX the calf was one of the symbols of the appalling loss of livestock deemed necessary by those responsible for controlling Foot and Mouth. The white calf somehow survived a mass cull of hundreds of animals on holdings around Membury, near Axminster, in East Devon and was found among the dead, apparently missed by those carrying out the cull. Anthony Gibson, in his autobiograhy Westcountryman out on this week – takes up the story.

IN early April, when I stopped for diesel on my way back to the office after lunchtime television duties, I spotted a headline in that day’s Daily Mirror: ‘Phoenix, the calf that came back from the dead,’ it read, over a photograph of a doe-eyed, pure white calf.

I quickly deduced that the calf was a survivor from the Membury disaster, in which cattle and sheep from no fewer than 15 holdings had gone up in smoke. ‘Phoenix’, as it had inevitably been dubbed had somehow survived.

I rang Tim Render, [the man from the Ministry of Agriculture in charge of the cull] to warn him of what was afoot.

“If you lot insist that that calf has to be slaughtered you’ll be crucified,” I told him.

He seemed unconcerned. “Oh well, we’ll just have to leave it up to the vets,” was his reply. “Rules are rules.”

Entirely predictably the vets insisted that an exception could not be made for a single calf, no matter how beguiling it might appear or iconic it might have become. And the media balloon duly went up. It wasn’t until Alastair Campbell [Tony Blair’s press secretary] became involved that a reprieve was granted. I would love to have known what he’d said when news of this entirely gratuitous cock-up reached him.