In the hierarchy of lorry drivers, those who transport livestock come at the bottom of the food chain. The drivers who carry "dry" rather than "wet" loads feel superior.
At motorway cafes, the livestock man knows to park well away from other lorries, otherwise there will be complaints about the smell from the stock. In areas where lorries stop for the night, the livestock man must keep his distance.
However, there are some advantages. At ferryports in Europe, the livestock lorry is treated as a priority. It's loaded and unloaded quickly, especially in Britain where the travelling public constantly complain about animal movements.
It is reasonable to assume that the double-trailer carrying hundreds of sheep from Scotland was given priority when it made the short crossing to Northern Ireland on February 19th.
The sheep had been purchased in Carlisle market and, according to the documentation, they were destined for a meat plant in Northern Ireland, where they were to be slaughtered.
Because the movement was an internal UK one, the sheep were not even counted. The laden lorry was weighed and its unladen weight subtracted and it was estimated there were 300 animals on the truck.
On arrival in the North, there was a better system of checking. Officials there counted 291 sheep and looked at the documentation which said the sheep were destined for slaughter in a Northern plant.
What happened after the lorry cleared the customs check in the North is unclear, but part of the consignment ended up at a farm in Meigh, on the Armagh-Louth border, and their presence there has created a national agricultural crisis.
This load of sheep has turned out to be a potential time-bomb, because as the trader was going about his business Carlisle mart was one of a growing list of sites in Britain which had been contaminated with foot-and-mouth. In all, three British marts which handled 25,000 sheep at that critical stage had scattered animals throughout these two islands and delivered the first case of the disease to Northern Ireland since 1941.
On March 1st, it was confirmed that 21 hoggets (castrated male sheep) which had been delivered to Meigh from Carlisle had all contracted the disease and were destroyed with all other animals on the farm.
THE number and length of journeys undertaken by the men who transport "wet goods" have astonished even people who work in the industry. The Carlisle mart was contaminated with sheep moved from Devon, but those had come some time before from the north of England.
As the number of cases began to rise in Britain and the television showed bonfires burning infected animals, similar pyres were being built in France, the Netherlands and Germany, to whose farms sheep and cattle from Britain had been trucked.
Over the past two years Irish livestock trucks have been rolling out of east-coast ports carrying sheep to destinations in Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and even as far as Turkey. Some lorries bring pigs to Germany.
The journeys reflect a number of things: the growth in factory-style farming, the reduction in the number of slaughtering facilities, and a growing demand for "national" food because of BSE.
Farms all over Europe have been getting bigger to cope with the demands placed on them for cheap food led by the multiple retail grocery chains. Corners are frequently cut in terms of feeding and animal welfare.
Again, to meet demand, fewer, better-equipped abattoirs are the order of the day, and this leaves vast tracts of Britain and Ireland without local slaughtering facilities.
Since the BSE crisis broke in the late 1980s, there has been a growing demand from consumers for local produce. This so-called "nationalisation" of food has led to the mass movement of animals. To service this need, animals are moved from country to country and, after a specified period on farms, take on the "nationality" of the country in which they are held.
That is why last year nearly half-a-million young animals left Ireland for various mainland European countries to take on new nationalities before slaughter.
Many of the farms to which these animals are taken are owned and operated by meat plants.
HOWEVER, while the sheep which came into Northern Ireland on Monday, February 19th, could have spent time on a Northern farm and have become "Irish", because there is an all-Ireland policy in relation to sheepmeat, that is not what happened. The Northern authorities know they were not slaughtered, and at some stage 21 of the animals arrived and were left at a farm in Meigh, just north of the Border.
The load appears to have been broken up, but on Tuesday morning a consignment of what the Kepak meat-processing plant in Athleague, Co Roscommon, called "lambs" were delivered at 4 a.m. and slaughtered. They were processed for the French market within a few hours.
Two days later, on Thursday 22nd, staff from the Department of Agriculture were at the plant, disinfecting it.
It took the Department almost a week to admit that a load of sheep had gone missing, and it was only on Thursday last that the Minister for Agriculture, Joe Walsh, came out and said that, while it could not be proved, he believed the sheep had passed through or had had contact with the Meigh animals.
Kepak admitted that the lambs were delivered in the name of a sheep farmer from Offaly who was known to the factory. What they did not appear to know was that the lambs were not the property of this farmer, who is now said to have left the country.
The all-Ireland approach to the sheepmeat industry by the EU is open to abuse. There is leakage into the system from Britain because sheep which are supposed to be slaughtered in the North are sometimes not.
A refinement of the fraud is to bring the animals into the Republic and present them in the name of a local farmer who is entitled to a 4.2 per cent VAT rebate. The event at Athleague is significant because of the contact with the diseased sites in Scotland and Northern Ireland and the possibility that the disease could be spread all over the island.
There are those who would argue that because the ban had not been placed on the importation of animals from Britain at the time the sheep reached this island, the disease could still have been brought here in a legitimate load of animals from the North.
That is cold comfort, but the lack of information on the route, contacts and other possible sources of spread, because the sheep were smuggled, is making the job of finding every possible contaminated site difficult.