I received permission to forward this letter to others....I asked for some
insite into this from the Histo list awhile back and received several
informative posts which I added to what I had already seen coming from the
UK...Below is a letter from a fellow Labrador breeder in Holland....Please,
I'm not an animal activist, but I do fine it hard to understand the mass
slaughter of healthy animals.I have bred, raised and showed labrador
retrievers for some 25 years, working with mostly the Swedish and English
bloodlines....Because of this I understand more then many just how 'small'
the world is....For years we have imported and exported breeding stock, now
we work alot with frozen and/or chilled semen. We understand the dangers of
airbourne viruses like Parvo in dogs.....Mieke said that for 'now at least',
the local government have decided not to kill the dogs and cats and
horses....Tomorrow they may change that thinking....From the stories I see
coming from the UK one can add zoos to dogs,cats and horses that may be
threatened in the future....Last nights news said there is now 55 cases in
Brazil(South America)....Politics and money is the real killer here.....It's
because of politics and money that the governments of the affected countries
don't want vaccinations....This was made very clear in several of the
articles coming from the government........If your wondering why I post this
to this list it's because tomorrow, next month or next year we here in the
US may be dealing with the same problems....So be aware, it may be your
problem tomorrow.....

Susan Owens,HT
ohenry@dfw.net


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Hi  all.
Thanks for your thoughts  send to me privatly,  we realy appriciate it.
I know this is not an issue for this list as this is a Labrador list and not
a foot and mouth desease list, still I would like to tell you about it
because being a dairy farmer myself I know its good people  (being a
consumer)
start to think about their daily food as well.
So if some of you are not interested in this, delete now.
This whole foot and mouth desease is very complex, not because the desease
is so terrible, animals can survive this desease quite easely withing 3
weeks and there is a good vaccin to prevent getting it, so the true enemy is
not foot and mouth but *politics and economy*.

Ask your parents how much they payed for meat, bread, eggs milk etc. right
after worldwar 2. You will find that the price of your daily food is just as
cheap or expensive now as is was then. We are talking about more then 50
years ago.
To continue I need to tell you something about our country first.
The Netherlands is a small country, within 4 hrs. you drive from south to
north and within 2 hrs. from west to east.
On this little peace of earth live over 16 million people.
Most of them in the west because that is where our industry is with big
harbours like Rotterdam and Amsterdam with A-dam Airport.
Most Dutch farmers live in the east where there is some good country life.
Still also farmers live quite close to each other, meaning that a virus like
foot and mouth can spread easely.
Footh and mouth is a desease that goes back to the 15th century so it always
has been there, right after ww 2 in 1952 they developed a vaccin against it.
From then we vaccinated our cows for 40 years till 1992.
Then the European Union decided not to vaccinate anymore because export
possibilitiy's would increase enormiously as country's like U.S.A, Can.
Japan and Korea didn't want to import meat from vaccinated animals.
Also our goverment stimulated farmers to produce more and more just to keep
the price of food low.
Now the Netherlands is exporting 90% of its produced meat, only 10% if this
export is going to the ebove named country's.
The rest of it stayes in Europe.
When foot and mouth hit the UK, farmers got very scared over here and asked
for vaccination strait away, the EU said NO.
Then a transport of calfs from Ireland (with NOT infected animals) to the
Netherlands had a rest stop in France, this is a place where people take
care of animals during this stop.
Now the problem is that this place in France also had sheep from UK (that
was infected by foot and mouth) a few days before this transport arrived.
The transport got on its way to Holland and with this transport also the
desease.
The calfs were brought to about 4 farms in this country.
These farms are only importing these calfs, have them grow for a few months
and then export or butcher them.
As I told you before farmers live quite close to each other and in the
seroundings of these farms there are also dairy farms like ours who only
produce milk.
Those farmers never import cows or calfs or whatever cause they have their
own stock, and they raise their own calfs born from their own cows so all
those farmers have many generations of stock to take care of, milk them
twice a day, feeding them, and help every newborn calf into this world. This
is also emotionally differend from those calf farms I was talking about
before.
Now all those dairy farms in the serounding of infected calf farms are
distructed and this happens on the farm itself.
From today our goverment started to vaccinate all animals on these farms to
stop the virus ( EU gave green light for that) but this is not to keep the
animals but because there is no distruction capasity enough to distruced all
of these animals as the farmers and our goverment don't want them to be
burned on the fields like in the UK.
Vaccinated animals are healthy animals but it means that farmers with
vaccinated animals have to wait till they come and get their animals for
distruction.  Farmers are do very scared and angry cause we are talking
about killing HEALTHY animals.
Another thing is that EU also stopped zoo's to vaccinate all animals who are
able to get foot and mouth.
I hope you guys know what Im trying to explain here, the farmers are
desperate, not infected erea's are closed from the outside world because
they fear to get the desease, with is very contagious, it can be brought
over by birds, by people in their hair, clothing, shoes and even just by
air.
The desease only hits animals with two hoofs...like cows, sheep, pigs and
goats.
Why I was scared for my dogs was that the Agro Culture dep. was killing
every animal on those farms, also animals that were not able to get the
desease, but can spread it like our dogs . Only the day before yesterday
they decided not to kill any dogs cats or horses belonging to those farms.
 Mieke.
www.pennyroyals.net