1 | 1 | | 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. |
2 | 9 | | 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. |
3 | 21 | | 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. |
4 | 36 | | 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. |
5 | 43 | | 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. |
6 | 50 | | 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. |
7 | 63 | | 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. |
8 | 67 | | 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 |