Give alpacas bTB vaccine, urges charity
GIVE alpacas bovine tuberculosis (bTB) vaccines to prevent them being shot like Geronimo, a charity has urged, as his owner said she would film his execution.
The six-year-old stud, from Gloucestershire, is set to be slaughtered after an appeal to have him re-tested for the deadly disease was refused by the High Court last week.
His owner, Helen Macdonald, said last night she would film his killing and upload it to social media because she wants “the world to know the truth about what the UK Government did”.
In a world first, the Government is trialling the jabs in cattle in order to save tens of thousands from being culled to stop the spread of the deadly disease. The British Alpaca Society (BAS) is now calling on ministers to extend the programme to include alpacas and other animals susceptible to the disease. The call comes during a bitter dispute over the planned euthanising of Geronimo.
George Eustice, the Environment Secretary, defended the decision to put the animal down and the reliability of the tests used.
“There has been a great deal of focus on the case of Geronimo, the alpaca, last week. However, each week, on average, we have to remove more than 500 cattle from herds due to infection in England alone,” he wrote in the Mail on Sunday.
He added that he investigated Geronimo’s case “on several occasions” and concluded that his test results are a “strong indicator” the animal has bTB.
Dr Duncan Pullar, chief executive of the BAS, told The Sunday Telegraph: “In the cattle world, a better way of doing this is what we need. The Government is currently working on vaccination trials in cattle – they resisted that for quite a long time. Our argument is let’s get vaccines sorted out for alpacas.
“Most alpacas are kept as pets, and we don’t eat them. A vaccination system would be a much more reliable way of controlling the disease.”
The Prime Minister’s official spokesman has now confirmed that permission for a re-test will not be granted, as the tests for the disease are “highly reliable” and false positives are “incredibly rare”.
“Sadly, Geronimo has tested positive twice for TB using highly specific, reliable and validated tests,” he said.