The Foot and Mouth Virus is a natural phenomenon, and nature has its own way of dealing with it. Only flawed government policy driven by modern pharmaceutical veterinary practice, and the global transportation of meat and livestock has turned it into a crisis. 

Nature’s way is for livestock to endure the symptoms (which are no more severe than flu is for humans). Most animals survive the experience and benefit from an enhanced natural immunity to any future attack from the virus, which they pass on to their offspring through natural selective breeding. Thus the herd is strengthened over time. This was normal practice, and worked well for farmers during the first 10,000 years after the agricultural revolution.

Modern pharmaceutical veterinary practice changed all of that during the middle of the last century under the delusion that it could do better than nature. This is when the current practice of culling stock at the first symptom began, and now takes the form of a DEFRA jackboot stomping through the countryside - to the tune of £8B and 7 million animals in 2001.

Any O Level biology student could figure out that during the last 60 years since this practice started, our domestic livestock has been denied the opportunity to develop or pass on natural immunity to viruses which have become more prevalent due to global transportation of animal feed, meat and livestock. Consequently we now have a very weak and vulnerable population of farm animals that collapse like a pack of cards as soon as a strain of the virus shows up.

To a large extent this problem will be resolved as we come to the end of the era of cheap oil, when global transportation of animal feed, meat and livestock become unviable. Then we can return to more secure localised agriculture once more. But in the meantime someone needs to blow the whistle on this crazy mass cull policy, and let farmers take back the control that served them well for 10,000 years.