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Another voice

11     The 'disclosure' was 'immensely damaging for the Government and for the Minister
2 personally,' said the main story in the Independent on Sunday. What was disclosed?
3 Another sex scandal? Another KGB 'agent of influence'? Insider trading? Tax fiddling?
4 No, the revelation was that a farming business in which the Minister of Agriculture is a
5 sleeping partner sells its calves at the local market and that some of these calves are then
6 exported to Holland or France, where they are raised in crates. As a result of this
7 disclosure, the Minister, Mr William Waldegrave, and his family, have to be given public
8 protection from possible terrorist attack.
29     We are invited to believe that Mr Waldegrave is hypocritical and cruel. No matter
10 that his farm manager sells male calves in the same way as any other farm manager in
11 Britain, and that if he did not do so he would find no market for them. No matter that
12 every aspect of the thing is legal and above board, and that this is an established trade
13 rather than a new venture. That is not good enough. According to Sir Andrew Bowden,
14 who is a Conservative MP, whosoever harms one of these little ones by however remote a
15 degree, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he
16 were drowned in the depths of the sea. It is Sir Andrew's view that all Mr Waldegrave's
17 caIves should be slaughtered rather than put in those crates. He wants a futile gesture at
18 this stage. 1 could not see Sir Andrew, because he was speaking on the Today programme
19 on Radio 4, but 1 expect he was wearing leather shoes and quite possibly had milk in his
20 coffee.
321     There is something so mad about all of this that one finds oneself pushed to the
22 opposite extreme. 'So what,' I almost hear myself saying, 'if some calves are squashed
23 together a bit and cannot go gambolling over the fields? It is a small price to pay for more
24 succulent veal. ' This is a mistaken reaction, probably, because although human sustenance
25 and health, and even human comfort and pleasure, are far more important than the
26 equivalent for animals and should generally be preferred if the interests of the two
27 conflict, it does sound as if these crates are cruel, and to be cruel is to be subhuman. 'It is
28 contrary to human dignity,' says the new Roman Catholic catechism, 'to cause animals to
29 suffer or die needlessly.' It is on roughly this principle, in fact, that Mr Waldegrave and his
30 predecessors have been acting. They have banned the crates in Britain, they want them
31 banned throughout the European Community, and they have insisted on stricter rules
32 about the transporting of livestock. Mr Waldegrave is suffering, not for the first time, for
33 being a humane politician who is interested in doing the right thing. Fanatics hate people
34 like that. If he had never shown the slightest concern for animal welfare they would have
35 been less beastly (if one may still use the word thus) to him.
436     The passage from the catechism quoted above goes on to say, 'It is likewise
37 unworthy to spend money on them [animals] that should as a priority go to the relief of
38 human misery. One can love animals. One should not, however, direct to them the
39 affection due only to persons.' More and more people in Britain appear to reject these
40 propositions. 'Meat is murder' they daub on the window of some inoffensive butcher, and
41 do not seem to mind a scrap that human foetuses are being killed every day at a hospital
42 near them.
543     It is often said that people only become sentimental about animals when they no
44 longer work with them, earn their living out of them, or have to kill them or see them
45 killed. This is probably true, but it does not explain the virulence of feeling so often shown
46 now. It is perfectly understandable that people are squeamish about seeing animals die or
47 seeing their blood and guts, or even about eating their flesh. But with the people who are
48 hysterical against Mr Waldegrave and breaking the windows of lorries at Shoreham we are
49 dealing with something else.
650     Until recent years, those who enjoyed venting moral outrage against the institutions
51 of the society in which they lived could do so in the name of the proletariat. The
52 proletariat was too large, too distant, too poor and too ignorant to have much say among
53 the counsels of those who protested in its name. You could use the cause of the workers as
54 the channel for your hatred of your parents or housemaster or other representatives of
55 authority, confident that the workers would not answer back. Now that has changed.
56 Workers have cars and own houses and do answer back. They are no longer exploited
57 enough to be interesting: indeed, they have a nasty way of catching up with your own
58 standard of living. So it is time for the caravan of protest to move on, and it finds that it
59 can park most safely among animals. Here is a whole world of creatures who will never
60 answer back. There is a heady prospect of eternal wrong, of screaming at Mr Waldegrave
61 and his successors to the crack of doom, of being able to hate humanity and feel good
62 about doing so at the same time.
763     It is not surprising that people like this exist .They appear in different guises in every
64 generation - image-breakers in churches, temperance fanatics, communists -, but it is
65 alarming that they can set up such a hue and cry that the Conservative Party has to treat
66 them respectfully.
867     It is outrageous that 'animal lovers' can threaten and embarrass Mr Waldegrave,
68 whom 1 suspect of being the last minister in the Cabinet to know how to milk a cow.
 
     Charles Moore in 'The Spectator', January 14, 1995