IF ANY national crisis ever deserved the Biblical billing "a tale told by an idiot'' the foot-and-mouth catastrophe must be it. Let us remember the crucial facts: foot-and-mouth is a preventable, usually non-fatal, disease that poses no risk to human health.

To tackle it, however, we have adopted an ever-widening policy of blanket slaughter that has now thrown the entire rural economy into disarray. People with no direct connection with agriculture find their livelihoods snatched away through the virtual closure of the countryside.

From the moment it was revealed that animals could be vaccinated - a fact not made clear at the outset - my view has been that this should happen. Of course, I am not a farmer.

Well, let's hear arguably Britain's most high-profile farmer Robin Page, pro-hunter, anti-right-to-roamer, pillar of the Countryside Alliance. Writing of his own livestock - cattle, sheep and pigs - he told readers of his Daily Telegraph column last weekend: "If it were up to me I would have them all vaccinated.''

Page didn't quite call the animal cull "medieval'' - the word I used a week ago. "They were more enlightened in medieval times,'' he wrote. "When foot-and-mouth was recognised the affected animals were taken to an isolated field until they recovered.''

Across the Channel, farmers in Mayenne, centre of the French foot-and-mouth outbreak, have marched to demand a return of vaccination, banned throughout the EU largely at Britain's behest in 1991. And from Holland, Mr Wien van den Brink, chairman of the Dutch Union of Pig Farmers, has told the European Parliament: "It is unbelievable that, in the 21st Century, an outbreak of a contagious disease for which there is a vaccine totally shatters a society.'' He added: "Animals are being treated as mere dirt.''

Indeed, and it was depressing that none of the three prayers issued by the Archbishop of Canterbury for use last weekend was concerned with the animals, the helpless, innocent victims of our madness.

It is said that vaccination would cost us exports. But far more will be lost by businesses going to the wall. And I would have thought that the British debacle would send a worldwide message that slaughter can no longer be relied on. In unenclosed countryside especially, the risk of a complete wipe out if the disease gets a hold seems to make vaccination imperative.

The Lake District, for example, is holding its breath over what could be almost the extinction of its indigenous Herdwick sheep.

But no one seems to be looking ahead. Once this crisis is over, can we really allow the foot-and-mouth sword of Damocles still to hang over the countryside, threatening businesses with instant shutdown? Plainly not. More radical still, can farming continue to set the rural agenda, including the response to crises like this, with implications far beyond its own industry? We need a policy that better balances all interests. And perhaps we need a different attitude to animals, accepting a need to nurse them through illnesses, and lower productivity as a consequence.

There is an essay by GK Chesterton entitled The Mad Official. Its thrust is that when wild actions are taken for granted a nation is going mad. He writes: "There are peoples that have lost the power of astonishment at their own actions. When they give birth to a grotesque notion or foolish law they do not start or stare at the monster they have brought forth.

"These nations are really in danger of going off their heads en masse, of becoming one vast vision of imbecility, with toppling cities and crazy countrysides, all dotted with industrious lunatics...''

That's Britain, here and now. The destroy-all response to foot-and-mouth is an expression of our insanity.

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