Just back from a short trip to farm country in southwest England where we spent the week with old friends. I find these trips to Britain so educational. The Brits are about 10 years ahead of us, with the stupid stuff as well as the smart stuff, so you always get a snapshot of what life will look like back here before too long.
The British newspapers are full of sex scandals
and “man bites dog” stories and the letters to the editor sections carry shrill complaints about the invasion of private life by every level of government. Parents now face a fine if their kids are absent from school without permission. Cameras follow every move you make in urban areas. During our stay, a woman was captured on video picking up her neigbour’s cat and stuffing it into a “wheelie bin” for trash. The mail was evenly split between support for the cat and support for the woman but by the third day she had received so many death threats she was placed under police protection.
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In the countryside, there is a refreshing air of dismissal among the farmers for many forms of regulation. In the space of a week my host cheerily invited me to break the law almost every day. But many of his neighbours are urban transplants who carry banners for a multitude of causes and maintain a vigorous neighbourhood watch program. It is always best to keep one’s head down.
Take the case of the Cattlemen vs. the Badgers, a fight that heated up considerably during our visit. Tuberculosis in cattle is now almost endemic in some parts of England, due in part to the skyrocketing population of badgers which carry the virus but are stoutly defended by the Badger Trust. The Trust has fought off every attempt to cull badgers in the past and now virtually every cattle farmer in our host’s neighbourhood has had a cow test positive for tuberculosis and been placed in quarantine. But science is on a full collision course with animal rights and the government has just announced that farmers will soon be licensed to shoot badgers on sight. The issue promises to be every bit as divisive as the ban on foxhunting brought in by Tony Blair’s government in 2004.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter about bans or cull licenses because life will go on behind the hedgerows, just as it has since the Norman Conquest in 1066. Just as the government has begun to accept that it is impossible to police a foxhunting ban, the Badger Trust will probably prevail in court and still find there has been an alarming drop in the badger population. Based on my observations, unlicensed badger eradication is already well underway.
In another interesting development, I noticed that virtually everyone belongs to a beef ring, a chummy group of like-minded residents who keep their freezers full of local beef, lamb, pork and chicken by contributing start-up money for the grower and turning up on a weekend for the killing, skinning and butchering which usually takes place in someone’s barn or garage. Yikes, I thought, weren’t we trying to get away from all of that?
“Yes, of course we were,” explained my host, “but governments always end up achieving exactly the opposite of what they set out to do. The regulation and inspection of abattoirs drove most of the small shops out of business and now it costs far more than the animal is worth to have it done by a licensed butcher. The United Nations Declaration of 1947 holds that every human being has an inalienable right to produce his own food, so all you have to do now is take a short course in home butchering and they let you process anything you like for home use. Of course, it’s still best to do it out of sight of the neighbours.”
I always thought of myself as an eccentric because I fatten a couple of hogs in the backyard. But that night I sat down with five other professional couples — teachers, lawyers and health care workers — and every one of them kept a few hogs in a shed behind the house. Their eyes lit up when they talked about their plans for the approaching Harvest Festival weekend, a three-day orgy of pig sticking and chicken gutting in the company of family and friends.
I wish I could have stayed.
