THE TRAGIC MISJUDGEMENT OF THE CONTIGUOUS
THE most pernicious and hated aspect of the battle to get on top of Foot and Mouth disease was the contiguous cull, devised by statistical modeller Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, London, the very same man who was been advising ministers over the coronavirus pandemic until forced to resign during the first lockdown when he made an trip across London to visit his lover.
Anthony Gibson reserves his greatest criticism of the handling of FMD by the government for the contiguous cull, which was designed to take out all animals from farms neighbouring those where there had been an infection, even if the neighbours’ animals were perfectly healthy and unaffected by the disease.
Anthony writes: “In Devon we got the contiguous cull. This was devised by a team of statistical modellers at Imperial College London, featuring a certain Neil Ferguson, whose doom-laden forecasts produced the Coronavirus lockdown, and Dr Cristl Donnelly, who has had a lot to do with bovine TB policy down the years. This team, having as far as we could gather, no knowledge or experience of the nature and structure of farms in North and West Devon, had fed a lot of unrefined data into their computers and come up with the conclusion that the way to stop FMD was to slaughter pre-emptively livestock on farms which bordered a confirmed case. It made no difference if the border was a 100-yard stretch of double hedgerow a mile from the buildings in which the infected animals had been housed, against a field which had seen no sheep or cattle all winter. It was technically contiguous, so that farm’s animals had to go.
“When Cristl and co came to Exter in April to justify their approach, in vain did we try to point out that this made no sense. Farms in that part of Devon were not neatly ring-fenced, geometrically arranged entities. They often consisted of a base holding, around the farmhouse, onto which all sorts of bits and pieces of land had been tacked over the years. If each of the farms had been surveyed and areas at risk of contact with neighbouring infection and any stock which might have been vulnerable pin-pointed, then the policy might have made sense. But none of that was done. A shared boundary with an outbreak farm meant a death warrant. End of. This approach was not only stupid, it was cruel: to farmers as well as their livestock. Very many of the best sort of farmers in the high-risk areas did everything in their power to prevent their livestock becoming infected, up to and including sending their families off to live with friends and relatives while they barricaded themselves in on the farm.
“Four times as many farms in Devon had their livestock slaughtered in the name of the contiguous cull as had confirmed disease. Only on 20% of those 700 ‘contiguous’ farms was disease subsequently confirmed, and they would probably have been picked up in any case by the existing ‘dangerous contact’ policy, which was based on common sense. NFU HQ told us to accept the