How many more times will we be told that foot and mouth is spreading "like a plague"? It is a plague. To compare it with what it already is like a weather forecaster declaring that clouds are gathering in the west like clouds, and the sea today is like a sea.
Ranking with this assault on the English language, which is spreading like a plague, is a simultaneous assault on knowledge of any kind. This is symbolised most potently by the pious voodoo of disinfectant-mats everywhere, apparently projecting their viricidal magic through the soles of our feet to infuse our entire being with anti-foot-and-mouthness. Worse still is the repeated suggestion, echoed by Michael Noonan - taking time off from greening Irish politics to regreen Irish agriculture - that the f & m outbreak (which is spreading like a plague) is a warning that we should return to traditional, small-scale farming methods.
Imagined past
Why does the very word "agriculture" cause non-surgical lobotomies to spread like a plague? In virtually no other area of life do people hanker for some imagined past. Nobody wants Ford Anglias which break down every 600 miles and which, within 5,000 miles are ferrous oxide deposits on bald rubber. Nobody yearns for houses with draughts and coal fires and chilblains and frost on the inside of mid-winter bedroom windows. No one hankers for the days of P & T, when it took three years to get a telephone installed, and as long again to get an operator, whom you needed to connect you with anyone who wasn't an operator.
We have been rescued from such past horrors by science, which has cast its benign benefits across our lives - why, almost like a virtuous plague. For the first time in the history of the world, entire sub-continents such as China and India not merely can feed themselves, but are net food exporters. Where there is hunger in the world, it is man-made, caused by bad government, war or banditry. Famine caused by simple food shortages is a thing of the past.
In the past 50 years, we have seen the greatest advances in agricultural science since organised farming was invented in the alluvial gardens of Mesopotomia. Insecticides protect crops from depredation by man's most serious enemy; the green revolution has seen freshly created disease-resistant strains of vegetable replace traditional, more vulnerable varieties. New oil-based fertilisers have transformed modest soils into food factories. All over a world where hunger was once endemic, the emerging problem - spreading like a plague, begob - is obesity.
Scientific triumph
Agricultural science over the past 50 years has been a triumph; and instead of being grateful, instead of examining ways to harness science more precisely, to restore some of the lost diversity of the countryside, to use our resources properly so that we can re-invent the lost meadowlands, and restock them with the flowers and wildlife which have been damaged by science in our drive to produce food, and to use modern technology to transform desert to grassland, we are talking about reverting to discredited, but ecologically sound agricultural methods. Bonkers.
The countryside is not a benign place, and the solutions to its problems are often not ecologically benign. There is a roadside bank near where I live which has been turned into an 80-yard long rat-tenement. Rats sit on it and chew the cud, the way rats do, discussing the weather, picking their teeth, and maybe chatting about the rat-babes they scored with last night.
There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of rats in this colony. They obviously have a major food source, because some of them are the size of cats. At my approach, they sit on their hind legs, with an eyebrow raised inquiringly, as if to say, "Yes? You want something?" They are as scared of me as they are of an orphan field-mouse. The largest of their number could probably mate with a badger, and all the poor badger could do in reply would be to fake an orgasm.
How do you deal with a ratopolis teeming with such brutes? By ecologically sound methods, such as cutting off their food supply (whatever that is)? Really? And then what happens to the rats? Do they not disperse to a nutritionally more congenial habitat, namely my house and gardens? Might it not be wiser simply to kill them where they are, with some frightful, environmentally unsound poison, meanwhile enjoying a good long gloat?
Pig swill
Nature is red in tooth and claw. The plant which "naturally" resists disease or insects probably does so by emitting some chemical which might be very bad for you indeed, as indeed might be the "natural" fungus on organic wheat. And it wasn't a "modern" agricultural method but a traditional one of a man feeding pig-swill to his swine which caused the eruption of foot-and-mouth. That was the source of the catastrophic infection which is now, apparently, spreading like a plague.
Of course, all that is science does not necessarily glister: it was some bright boffin in the cutting edge of the animal-feeds industry who chose to give cattle their ground-up grandmothers to eat, with all the resultant splendours of BSE. But this doesn't mean we should reject science, only be more careful of it. Only people-hating eco-fascists think that the "environment" is more important than feeding and clothing the world, which is what science has been doing over recent decades. For even more dangerous to civilisation than animal plagues is modish, human anti-knowledge.