Sir, - I remember a painting that hung in a corridor in my old school: a man with a shepherd's crook holding a small lamb: the Good Shepherd. Any convents still extant might consider replacing this with the millennial update: the picture, one of the saddest I have ever seen (The Irish Times, March 3rd), of a farmer holding a lamb, one hour old, about to be loaded on to the truck that would take it to be put to death. It has to be done, of course. But does that make it any less dreadful?
Yet in all the outpourings since the foot-and-mouth outbreaks began only an honourable few have expressed concern for the animals. Comment has been on a higher place, rounding up all the usual catch phrases that come so trippingly off the tongue. Economic meltdown. Damage to export markets. Threats to disease-free markets. Loss of income across all sectors. Wipeout of sport. Collapse of tourism.
Living in the vibrant new world of intensive farming, VAT rebates and EU subsidies (not to mention smuggling), we no longer think of animals as living, sentient beings. They have become products, part of the "food chain", a segment of "agri-business", on a par with sacks of meal and bags of potatoes.
I am not sentimental about animals. I know cattle, sheep, pigs and chickens are bred mainly to be killed and eaten. But have we no responsibility for ensuring they don't suffer unduly? Everyone who has taken a dog or a cat to the vet knows that animals do feel apprehension and fear. How can long, stressful journeys be justified? There must be a more humane way of turning animals into food. Intensive farming may have reduced prices and increased profits, but at the cost of BSE, swine and Newcastle fever, foot-and-mouth. If the only solution to these problems is mass extermination and funeral pyres, it's time to solve the problems.
Does nobody care? Where are the successors of St Francis, the followers of the God who "tempers the wind to the shorn lamb"? - Yours, etc.,
R. Dardis, Palmerston Road, Dublin 6.