Animal Farm
A contribution from livestock editor Jonathan Long:
Anyone watching last night's episode of Animal Farm on Channel Four will have noted the appearance of a group of Belgian Blue cattle. Now I'm no great Blue fan, largely because of their historic poor locomotion and calving difficulties, but I know a good beast when I seen one.
And in the main, the modern Belgian Blue, with its improved walking ability and easier calving, is fundamentally a sound animal with the potential to produce plenty of lean beef, exactly what the modern consumer wants. The result of many years of carefully orchestrated selective breeding, the same thing every livestock farmer practices every time they plan a mating.
To suggest, as last night's program did that selective breeding, a centuries old practice and the only way of improving livestock genetics, is a form of genetic modification is laughable. Without selective breeding the modern world would quite honestly starve. Be it cattle, potatoes, wheat or pigs, they've all been bred to produce food efficiently and economically.
The implication that because the bulls featured were having semen collected for AI they were unable to breed naturally was also a joke. Thankfully, the program's sceptical host Giles Coren was balanced by biologist Olivia Judson, who put a convincing, reasoned and sound argument for selective breeding.
That Belgian Blues were the chosen rather than any other breed is no doubt due to their heavily muscled appearance. However, anyone suggesting selective breeding is a form of genetic modification could quite happily have picked on any other breed and implied the same of them.