Drunken squirrels
As some of you will know, if squirrels get drunk they fall out of trees. And Americans seem prone to getting hold of powerful chainsaws to fell large trees onto their own cars, or maybe the neighbour’s porch. That’s the sort of thing that you find out when you are in lockdown. One YouTube genre very popular in Spain involves men with pickup trucks and very long poles running around large fields herding fighting bulls.
I have always imagined fighting bulls lolling around in the shade of ancient cork oaks in a Spanish version of an English deer park, owned by a Spanish aristocrat with a twirly waxed moustache and one of those black hats. So it was disappointing to see them in some fairly rough grazing, being herded by the sort of shabby blokes in wellies who wouldn’t look out of place on an English farm, driving battered pickups just like ours.
The main difference was in their traditional long wooden poles. Your real traditional cattle-men round here always reach for a length of one-inch blue polyethylene water pipe when they want to make cattle do things that they’re not too keen on. The Spaniards use their long poles to get the bulls into progressively smaller fields, terrorising anyone travelling the country roads in the process, and eventually chivvying them into walled coralls where the men can run around on the white-painted flat tops of the walls, opening and shutting gates and manipulating the bulls into various pens.
The climax – or maybe the anti-climax – of these films is when the ‘toros bravos’ find themselves one by one in the final small pen, where they jump around a bit and the bull farmer pours some thick whitish substance onto their backs and shoulders out of a 5-litre plastic container. This is done in a fairly rough and ready way, not measured in any way except perhaps ‘by eye’. After this the bull is let back out onto the range, where you see him shaking himself a bit, clearly thinking ‘What the hell was that all about?’ or possibly ¿Pa' qué carajo fue todo eso? before wandering off across the field.
The liquid poured on is what we call a ‘pour on’, and it was that sight of this being roughly poured on to the backs of fighting bulls that started me ruminating about our practice over here. ‘Pour-ons’ contain substances such as Ivermectin and other ‘antihelmintics’, that are used to treat parasites of cattle, and of sheep too, though I’m mainly concerned with cattle today. Cattle host parasitic worms in the gut and in the lungs, as well as liver fluke and warble fly. The warble fly is a parasite that has been eradicated in the UK but may well still be around in Spain. And these chemicals will kill any other internal or external parasites, because they are systemic, pervading the animal’s body, making it poisonous to parasites and producing insecticidal cow-pats for a good month after treatment.
When we were kids we used to go and call our friend Eddie Thomas’s cows in from the big orchard, full of Blenheims and White Normans and the like, and sometimes we would ride back on a particularly placid one. The cows would settle in to their supper and to being suckled by the calves that lived next door in the calves’ cot. Now and then Eddie might spot a small lump on a cow’s back caused by a warble fly grub. Eddie would squeeze this as you might squeeze a blackhead, and the grub would fly out like a cherry pip. It didn’t happen very often – these cows were in close contact with Eddie twice a day, and he never missed the very rare cases of warble strike. We called the adult warble flies ‘brees’, and referred to a cow made restless by hearing brees flying around, or a skittish girl, with the phrase “’Er’s got a bree on ‘er”.
The warble fly is not a problem in the UK because it has been eradicated, but I suspect it is still a problem in Spain, and anyway the chemical treatments that eradicated the warble are still used for other parasites. The smell of cow pats drying in the summer sunshine is, for me and many other country people, a strong nostalgic signal waking the memory of summers on the farm in childhood, like the sudden clap of a stock-doves’ wings in a drying cattle fold on a lazy afternoon. Cow pats in the fields were interesting. We were little boys of course, with fairly grubby interests. The fertility of the cow pats darkened the lush grass that grew around them, and they seemed to encourage mushrooms. There were always insects in and on them, maturing and hatching as the pats dried and curled in the sunshine, beetles, grubs, dung flies. Even a child could see that they had a vital role in the ecosystem, especially when we found them scratched out by starlings feeding on the grubs. If we had lived anywhere where Choughs survived we might have known how essential they are to the continued existence of this bright exciting bird too. We now know much more about their importance than anyone knew then.
There are 60 species of dung beetles in the UK whose lives revolve around these cow parts – or at least there were. They are very important in the ecosystem, improving grassland and soil fertility and, ironically, reducing the impact of parasites on stock by recycling cow pats and by themselves hosting mites that destroy the eggs of cattle parasites that are passed and mature in the cow pats. As usual, farm chemicals are destroying creatures which might help to make those same chemicals unnecessary by poisoning the cow pats. These poisoned cow pats also threaten other creatures, including the Nightjar, as well as the Chough, two threatened species ‘protected’ by the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, and the rare Serotine Bat, listed as vulnerable to extinction on the British Red List, as well as the threatened Greater Horseshoe Bat, because they all feed on dung beetles. You can guarantee that these are just the most distressing and newsworthy effects of these chemicals on ecosystems that we may never fully understand; and you may speculate, gentlemen of the jury, as to what ‘protected’ under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 means in practice.
The next phase of my ruminations was to do what it seems apposite to call a straw poll of some of my farming neighbours, to see how and why they use these chemicals. Some of these farmers are people I have known for years, for whom I have both respect and affection. Some less so, of course, but if I seem critical of farming as an industry I like to think I can empathise with individual farmers. All of them are caught up in a system that pressurises them to take certain courses of action. ‘System’ might suggest something that has evolved from careful strategic planning by governments that took into account the needs of farmers and of food production balanced with the need to protect and conserve nature and rural society, but nothing could be further from the truth, and there is not really a system at all in that sense. But farmers, who often lack formal training, are pulled and pushed by agronomists and chemical manufacturers and by a farming press dependent on advertising, as well as by commercial pressures where the valuation of the farm and its live and dead stock bears little relation to the income generated.
The most logical and coherent part of the ‘system’ seems to be organic farming, as you might expect. The organic farmers I talked with did not have much of a problem with parasites, especially with adult cattle. They were more likely to use grassland management techniques such as the rotation of grazing, or the use of herbal leys containing plants such as sainfoin and birdsfoot trefoil, to minimise parasite infection, and they were more likely to use more sophisticated techniques such as faecal egg counts to check if they had parasite problems. Organic farmers are not permitted to use chemicals to control parasites without the involvement of a vet and an application for ‘derogation’ from the organisation that manages their organic status, and they seem more likely to treat only the affected animals. In this sector the use of all the chemicals used to control parasites is both regulated and limited and is seen as both the last resort and as a small part of a holistic system. And they cannot treat prophylactically – they have to demonstrate a problem before being allowed to use these chemicals.
The situation is very different on conventional farms. Regulation is mainly concerned with human health (there are ‘withdrawal periods’ before the milk or meat of treated cattle can be sold) rather than with protecting the environment from what are seriously toxic chemicals. The individual farmer can decide when and how to medicate, under pressure from salesmen and advertising, and he does not need to consult a vet.. He is free buy pour-ons and drenches over the counter and to pour them on whenever he likes. The easiest and most haphazard method is to use a pour-on that will kill pretty well any insect that the cattle encounter, both internally and externally, and to treat all the cattle at once. Chemicals like ivermectin, widely used and extremely toxic to wildlife, will be in the bodies of the cattle for at least a month and be excreted onto the pastures throughout that month. Farmers usually treat cattle in the autumn when they are brought in , and again in the spring before they are turned out to grass. Conventional farmers are less likely to use alternative techniques like grassland management, more likely not to bother to use techniques like faecal egg counts to identify a problem, more likely to make the treatment part of a regular routine, more likely to treat them all whether they need it or not. And the more intensive the farm, the greater the parasite problem is likely to be, and with it the overuse of these chemicals.
I’m not an expert on systems theory, in fact I don’t even know if such a thing exists. Maybe I just invented it. But if it did – or does – one of the principles would be that a system should have the ability to improve itself, that it had in-built pressures that motivated those caught up in it to make improvements. And that is where the organic system beats the conventional. It is a genuine self-regulating system run by and for people with an ethos over and above, or at least alongside, the profit motive; it has a serious if informal contract between the producer and the customer; and it has a regulatory system which pressurises farmers to find alternatives to the use of chemicals, and there is an incentive for the entrepreneur to develop products that organic farmers can safely and effectively use..
Conventional farming has none of this, I suggest. The regulations that exist seem as far as I can see to lack an effective enforcement mechanism and are anyway not adequate to protect the environment even if they were enforced. Farmers can plan to treat animals in whatever way is cheapest and easiest, without consulting a vet, and as a result of this precautionary approach they can routinely poison the ecosystem of the whole farm, via dunging on the fields or by manure spreading, whether there is a problem or not, with no incentive to buy less harmful products, and no incentive for the manufacturers – who of course are central to this ‘system’ - to develop less harmful or more specific products because this system contains no mechanism to exert this kind of pressure. If a product were to be banned it is likely to be replaced by something that is just as harmful but has not yet been banned. Whatever is simplest, easiest, cheapest or most effectively propagandised by commercial interests will get done by the majority if farmers. They may say this is all about food production, the usual farmer’s explanation, but I am coming to believe that the main farming crop is money, shared out between the farmer and agribusiness in general, and food is merely a by-product. And the ecosystem? Wait until it is so bad that farming doesn’t make any money, and maybe we’ll think about it then.
My straw poll was mainly of cattle farmers, because that’s how it started, but if I look at sheep farming I do not expect it to be much different. And it is simply a matter of time before it is acknowledged that the over-use of similar pesticides and anthelmintic drugs given to destroy the gut parasites of the sheep that graze our uplands has led to huge declines in the populations of Curlews and Lapwings because it has caused similar declines in the invertebrates they feed on. Sheep farming in the uplands only continues because we subsidise it, and we are not yet aware enough as a society to understand that the Curlew and the Lapwing are irreplaceable creatures of such exquisite and evocative beauty that to threaten their existence should be beyond our comprehension, beyond possibility - and would be, if we had a serious Farming and Countryside Policy. Having left the EU we have an unrivalled opportunity to formulate such a holistic policy, which might decide which parts of our countryside it is appropriate to farm and which are totally unsuited, how to farm to produce wholesome food without destroying and poisoning the environment, how to encourage wildlife confined to tiny reserves to spread back out into a countryside re-made hospitable to life, how to support rural employment and rural housing and transport and rural communities, and how to start to energise those communities by democratising land ownership, as is already happening in Scotland. Doesn’t seem much to ask, does it?