Monks Go Mad Over Loss Of Cows They Say Britain’s Stampede To Slaughter Herds Over ‘Mad Cow Disease’ Is Morally Wrong
The quite sane cows on the Nunraw Abbey farm here would surely go mad if they knew what was in store for them.
In the next few days, dozens of them are to be shipped to a slaughterhouse in Edinburgh. There, heavy bolts will be shot at their heads, knocking them out. Their throats will be slit. Their heads will be cut off and their hides stripped. They will be disemboweled. Their carcasses will be hung from hooks.
So far, so good. This is the way that cattle destined for British dinner tables normally end their lives.
But then the cows go from food to toxic waste: Instead of being cut into prime Scottish steaks, the carcasses of the abbey’s organically raised cattle will be stained bright yellow for identification purposes. Then they will be shipped to a rendering plant, burned to ash, and buried in a landfill - all to satisfy British government attempts to rid Britain of “mad cow disease.”
To the largely vegetarian monks who tend and pamper the cows, the government’s demand that they destroy their healthy animals is wrong - practically and morally.
“Really quite sinister,” the abbey’s white-robed chief monk, Abbott Donald McGlynn, said of a government “slaughter scheme” to dispose of an estimated 200,000 dairy cows and beef cattle age 30 months or older. Most of the 200,000 animals are healthy, but all will be killed because mad cow disease cannot be verified without an autopsy.
The slaughter plan has so angered the abbey’s 17 Trappist-order Catholic monks that they recently decided to protest: They began eating beef stew.
The monks point out that none of their 450 cows has ever developed symptoms of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease. The cattle have never been fed the mix of chopped, underheated, infected sheep parts that apparently caused Britain’s mad cow disease outbreak by introducing a sheep brain disease called “scrapie” into British herds in 1986.
Destroying perfectly healthy cows is immoral, Father McGlynn said, because it will waste the meat of healthy cows at a time when “so many people are suffering from malnutrition.”
The forced slaughter is the British government’s latest attempt to deal with a mad cow disease crisis that shows no signs of easing as it enters its eighth week.
British government officials hope the plan will restore British and worldwide confidence in its beef while lowering the incidence of BSE. In March, government leaders stunned Europe and the world by announcing that scientists had found a tentative link between the cow brain disorder and a new strain of fatal human brain disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD).
About a dozen Britons have recently died from the new CJD strain. A 15-year-old Scottish girl, said by her parents to be an avid hamburger eater, was identified several days ago by her doctor as the country’s latest CJD victim.
But instead of reassuring beef-eaters or ending a worldwide export ban on British beef, the new slaughter plan so far has done little except make many people angry - including the monks of Nunraw Abbey farm, whose beef-stew protest does not include eating their own cows.
About 40 of the abbey’s older cattle - representing about 31,000 pounds of wasted meat - will be killed and incinerated under the plan. It’s an interruption of God’s “natural cycle of birth, maturity and finishing,” said Father McGlynn, who, like the rest of the monks, spends hours shoveling silage in the cattle barns.
The slaughter will end the 40 cows’ idyllic existence on the gently rolling, grassy hills of southern Scotland. Bulls impregnate cows in the way that nature intended. The calves are suckled for a year by their mothers. The pampered, contented herd eats nothing but grass or homegrown barley grain.