Home life
Sheep shock
Alice Thomas Ellis
1p
ut the cow creamer in the dishwasher the other day. It reposed there belly upwards with its legs sticking out, bearing a striking though melancholy resemblance to some real cows I saw in a recent photo- graph. These animals had contracted a disease which first drove them mad and then killed them. Previously, I believe, the affliction was confined in this country to sheep, and called `scrapie'. Somewhere else it is called 'kuru', and human beings suffer from it. Once it was supposed that it resulted from cannibalism, and particularly from the consumption of human brains, but now it has been suggested that the un- fortunate sufferers may merely have smeared themselves in blood.
I read this in the newspapers, which never now tell the full story for fear of libelling somebody too insignificant to make it worth while, and so I do not know whether this blood is human or not. It seems a dumb thing to do anyway and must attract unwelcome clouds of flies. Howev- er, it is not nearly so dumb as giving cows sheep to eat. Dead old sheep, unfit for human consumption, have been minced up and translated into protein pellets to en- courage cattle to grow bigger or supply more milk or maybe run faster or hurdle low fences. I don't really know the motive behind it. All I know is that whoever thought the idea up must himself have had very dodgy brains because now cows have contracted the sheep's disease.
I think of a nursery school. Teacher gazes meditatively round wondering what ideas the little blisters are hatching. 'No,' she says, drawing a bow at a venture, 'we don't put plasticine in the fish tank — or pull Samantha's hair, or take the hamster out for a walk.' She does not, unless she is herself deranged, say: 'We do not take the goldfish home in our hankie, or climb on the roof and jump down the chimney, or put the potting compost in Samantha's ears.' That is, some ideas do not occur to the normal mind, and I would have thought that feeding cattle on processed mutton was one of them. It would not strike the beef-eating public that it should request the meat producers not to muddle up the Sunday joints in this perverted fashion, until it learned of the fait accom- pli.
It has now been admitted that human beings could contract this ovine/bovine disease by consuming contaminated meat. At first it was thought that only the cows' brains were a hazard, so some cows which had gone insane were slaughtered and beheaded, and the rest of them duly turned into hamburgers etc. It is some time since I have bought sausages, meat pies, faggots or anything else unrecognisably chopped up because I heard of the wonderful new technology which can render every normal- ly unpalatable and unacceptable part of the animal fit to be chewed and swallowed, even its bones and gristle — and if God had intended us to eat bones and gristle He would have given us different tastes and more efficient teeth. Now I am considering full vegetarianism on prudent, rather than humane, grounds.
The only trouble is that the broadleaved veg may be radioactive, anything grown near London is full of lead, the merest lettuce may contain countless pesticides, likewise the fruit; and unless you boil the eggs for an hour or so you may get salmonella poisoning. Chickens are a fear- ful health hazard, the fish has probably died from swimming around in polluted waters, and the EEC wants to import all our wild game before it gets eaten in case it too is bearing some nameless scourge. It seems that in order to survive, unpoisoned, we should all simply grow our own bean sprouts on wet flannel. And I hate bean sprouts.
Previous page
