“Depopulation, Vaccination and Movement Restrictions”: ‘Cow Covid’ Measures Spark Revolt in France
The slaughter of entire herds of cattle to combat a disease outbreak in France has sparked widespread protests and a farmers’ revolt amid comparisons to draconian Covid measures. The Telegraph has more.
After two nights of clashes, taunts and tear gas, a group of veterinarians finally step off an armoured police vehicle in Ariège, walking the last few metres on foot, past burning tyres and mobile phones filming their every move.
Their task is to euthanise cattle, hundreds at a time, to stop a contagious disease engulfing southern France.
Yet, for many farmers the vets are the sharp end of an overzealous tool of “total slaughter” reminiscent of Covid-era regulatory overkill, and they are prepared to take extreme action to stop it.
“We have experienced health crises before, but such an outburst of hatred is unprecedented,” says Matthieu Mourou, Vice-President of France’s national veterinary order. “Intervening under police escort, with hundreds of angry people waiting, is something we have never experienced at this level.”
Online abuse has escalated. Some vets are being told: “Keep going like this and we’ll put your heads on pikes.”
The stand-off has left Emmanuel Macron, France’s already embattled President, and Sébastien Lecornu, his ‘soldier monk’ Prime Minister, scrambling to avert a Christmas of discontent.
The protests have grown increasingly radical.
Near the A63 motorway in Ariège, farmers dismantled a speed camera that they said was “blocking tractors” and dumped it onto a bonfire, footage shared widely online showed.
Elsewhere, manure has been hurled at prefectures, slurry sprayed on state buildings and tyres set alight beneath motorway bridges, as tractors tore up barriers and turned infrastructure itself into a weapon of protest.
At the heart of the unrest is lumpy skin disease (LSD), a highly infectious viral disease affecting cattle. It is harmless to humans, but devastating for herds.
Since June, 113 outbreaks have been recorded nationwide, spreading from east to south-west France.
In response, the authorities have imposed a strict eradication strategy: the systematic culling of infected herds, bans on livestock movements and emergency vaccination within a 50km (30-mile) radius.
Veterinary experts insist the disease is too virulent to rely solely on vaccination. But for many farmers, the policy of wiping out entire herds for a single confirmed case has become unbearable.
For many, the fury is deeply personal. “The cows have names, they have their character, their history,” said Sarah Dumigron, a breeder in Gironde.
“I’ve cared for them at night, I work seven days a week with them. I’ll fight to the end for my cows.”
In Ariège, Florian Sabria said he had stopped sleeping. “If they slaughter our herd, we won’t start again. It’s the work of a lifetime – the genetics, the work of our parents and grandparents.”
Confédération paysanne, the Left-wing union, has branded the eradication policy “more frightening than the illness itself”, urging an end to the culls and calling for blockades “to put an end to this madness”.
The anger is being fuelled by a broader set of factors including collapsing farm incomes, regulatory fatigue, fears of cuts to the next Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) budget, and dread over the EU-Mercosur trade deal.
On Monday, the revolt spread beyond farmers themselves.
More than 200 mayors and local elected officials gathered outside the prefecture in Foix, in the Ariège, calling on the state to “urgently listen” and reopen dialogue with farmers, and demanding a rethink of the total culling protocol in favour of more targeted slaughter of infected animals.
Last week, Annie Genevard, the French agriculture minister, insisted she had no alternative.
“To save the entire industry, slaughter is the only solution,” she told Le Parisien.
She has repeatedly framed the strategy around three non-negotiable pillars – “depopulation, vaccination and movement restrictions” – arguing that this is what “science and veterinarians” recommend, and what “foreign countries have applied”. …
At issue is France’s retention of its internationally recognised disease-free status, which underpins the free export of live animals and meat. Losing it would trigger trade barriers for at least a year.
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Depopulation. Vaccination. Movement restrictions. Now, where have I heard these words before?
it appears to be like Covid, an organised and agreed mission to destroy Farmers right across Europe and the uk, allowing our masters to control the food supply.
There is more than a whiff of Communist style control which created mass deaths through starvation in USSR ,
China, Cambodia etc
The entitled elites are losing control and so now they resort to the tyrants play book.
Farmers are our life support system, we need to protect them in order to protect ourselves.
First they came for the cows…
Where did it come from? Africa?
Good question. I looked it up. It also occurs in humans. As with Meningitis, Mass Invasion of Third World Disease Carriers is to blame. Not French cows. Notice Albania on the map. The media try to hide its real name by giving it the name “LSD” Lumpy Skin Disease. They have their little Globalist jokes…
Epizootic situation in the world for 2018-2019 on nodular dermatitis. | Download Scientific Diagram
Er, ‘nodular dermatitis’ means lumpy skin disease. The latter phrase just makes the scientific term more intelligible.
And?
The point is that this disease also affects humans, and can be compared to the huge increase in Meningitis cases in the West, resulting in horrific limb amputations and deaths, which can be directly related to the Mass Immigration of “SYMPTOMLESS CARRIERS” of Meningitis, from Africa and the Indian Subcontinent.
Just as Bovine Tuberculosis had been nearly wiped out in Britain until the Mass Immigration of Symptomless Human Carriers of TB: Indian Subcontinentals kicked out of three African countries in 1972-73 by Ethnic Africans angry at the Indians taking over all the top positions in those countries: Kenya, Tanzania & Uganda. Nobody called the Africans “racist” for kicking out the Indians & Pakistanis, who all swarmed into Britain instead of returning to India.
The British bovine TB outbreak was falsely blamed on badgers.
If I remember correctly, there was a scandal at a Hindu Temple in Wales decades ago, after they were caught sneaking in TB-ridden cattle from India because they preferred the taste of that milk.
The Toulouse area of southwest France has been particularly hard hit by this outbreak.
The Toulouse area also has the highest number of Albanian immigrants in France.
lumpy skin disease virus (LSDV), a Capripoxvirus, does not affect humans. It is not a zoonotic disease.
UTTERLY FALSE!
Show me a paper describing this particular infection (same virus as in cows) in people.
Capripoxviruses are animal pathogens, not human diseases. Human infection is extremely rare, mild, and typically limited to the skin after direct exposure.
The absurd response to the disease is strikingly similar to the appalling Government over-reaction to the Foot and Mouth outbreak in the UK in 2001. That 2001 over-reaction was justified by hypothetical modelling of the disase by the Imperial College team. Epidemiologists were scathing about the modelling and the over-reaction. But then the Imperial College team’s modelling of Covid was used to justify the over-reaction to Covid.
This also seems to be a continuation of the war on farmers that is being undertaking in so many ways.
Absolutely a war on farmers, then on what’s left of small businesses – we’re being herded into a communist cul de sac.
Yes, the 2001 FMD plandemic which opened my eyes to what governments can do. I hadnt forgotten that Fergusons alarmist modelling was responsible for death and destruction then and when his name was uttered again in March 2020 I knew what to expect.
This reminded me of the BSE outbreak a few decades ago, and the effect it had in the market. Even now, someone I know well won’t beef any more, on account of the scare about cases of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD). Then again, under foot and mouth, there were restrictions applied to many places, such as footpaths being closed etc.
This rather conveniently fits in with the globalists plans to ban meat by 2030.
I wonder how many of the affected cows have been fed bovaer?
Seems drastic for something that only kills 1 to 5 percent depending on age and condition and most recover in 3 weeks with complete recovery within 6 months. Surely better to allow natural immunity to develop as it has for millennia with other infections
The last paragraph is the most important. The measures are mainly in place to maintain a country’s disease free status.
You have to wonder if this is rational. What if ‘disease free status’ was not a policy. Sure there would be some mortality and loss of production. Maintaining ‘disease free status’ has the increased costs of surveillance, vaccination, mitigation, culling.
The same issue occurred and will occur again if Foot and Mouth disease rears its head.