Looser rules as lambing looms?

1 March 2001



Looser rules as lambing looms?

By FWi staff

FOOT-AND-MOUTH restrictions may be relaxed so sheep stuck in fields can be moved on to farms to avert an animal welfare crisis during the lambing season.

Farmers have warned of a looming welfare disaster if pregnant sheep are not moved to farms because of restrictions to control foot-and-mouth disease.

March and April are the busiest months of the lambing season.

Junior agriculture minister Baroness Hayman said she was considering a system to permit the movement of in-lamb ewes and a number of in-calf cows.

“The system must satisfy [MAFF chief vet] Jim Scudamore in terms of disease control. It would have to be very strictly policed and regulated,” she said.

Agriculture minister Nick Brown said the ministry had also been monitoring the animal welfare situation on pig farms.

He said he was mindful of the problems caused by the build-up of pigs up on farms in East Anglia last year as a result of swine-fever movement restrictions.

The minister indicated that he may consider repeating a welfare disposal scheme in which farmers who entered pigs for slaughter were compensated.

But he said he did not want to offer false expectations about compensation schemes across the food chain for consequential losses from foot-and-mouth.

“The most important measures to be put in place are ones that control the disease,” Mr Brown told journalists in London on Thursday (1 March).