THE foot-and-mouth crisis had been running for about a week before news emerged that animals can be vaccinated against it. And a further week or so passed before it was widely reported that the disease, far from being fatal to the infected animals, is an equivalent of our common cold, which most animals would shake off in a fortnight or so.

And for this, funeral pyres, fuelled mainly by healthy animals, or at least those showing no sign of the disease, are burning the length and breadth of Great Britain. Even though - which has been heavily stressed from the outset - the meat from infected animals poses no health risk.

Of course, the disease depresses farm incomes. Sick animals produce less meat, and the milk yield of infected cows is said be permanently lowered. Farmers can't sell or buy at their chosen moment.

But these setbacks don't look startlingly different from handicaps than can, and do, affect people in virtually every occupation. Business and profitability can, and do, rise and fall for a thousand reasons.

Foot-and-mouth is an economic issue rather than a food safety or public health issue. Whether a threat to the financial wellbeing of one section of the community justifies virtually shutting down the countryside and imposing wholesale slaughter on farm animals, coupled with talk of having to kill wildlife, is the key point.

If the survival of the Britain's farmers, and with it our countryside, depends on it, the answer must be yes. But it also has to be some kind of insanity that has brought us to this point.

Vaccination is ruled out because it would scupper the export of livestock, whose receiving countries insist on animals free from the disease. Well, we are here hoisted by our own petard. For it was largely at Britain's insistence, under Margaret Thatcher, that the policy of slaughter was made compulsory in the EU in 1985.

At that time, vaccination cost about 10p a dose but, since foot-and-mouth hadn't appeared in Britain since 1967, the farming industry successfully argued that this cost would be an unnecessary burden.

The number of animals that must die before the present outbreak is overcome is, of course, unknown. Meanwhile, the knock-on effects to other industries, not only those directly related like haulage, but others, such as tourism, are incalculable. But though farmers will be compensated, those incidentally affected will not.

And, to whatever "natural' ways foot-and-mouth can arise, must now be added an unnatural one - terrorism. For the likes of Saddam Hussein will not have failed to notice how a country can be brought to its knees by this animal disease, which is probably easy to introduce.

This all points to the fact that if animals can be protected, they must be. For even the proper long-term solution, the re-creation of a nation of small farmers buying and selling mainly locally, will not be achieved overnight. You might agree with me that it will never be achieved at all.

AMONG the winter birds feeding in my garden is a pair of blackcaps. My bird book, about 50 years old, records the species as only a summer visitor. Well, there's one welcome change.

My birdbook says: "If one hears floating out from a bush or hedgerow a birdsong of the first order that is clearly not a blackbird's, and is not divided into contrasted strains like the song of thrush or a nightingale, one may be sure the singer is a blackcap.''

Like all our winter garden birds, the blackcaps prefer Alpen above all else - peanuts, birdseed, apples, even my wife's best fruit cake. Extravagant? Yes. But you have to get your priorities right.

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