‘It was the pyres,’ said my husband. He meant the effect of television pictures of cattle, hooves silhouetted against the sky, burnt during the foot-and-mouth outbreak of 2001. It was eradicated by culling six million beasts, not by vaccination producing herd immunity.
In Shropshire, stone memorials survive to the outbreak of rinderpest (like Covid-19 a viral disease) of 1865-67. One outbreak ‘swept 54 head off this farm’ near Market Drayton. ‘They died without remedy and here lie. “Shall we receive good from God and not evil?” Job 2:10.’ Nationally, 289,581 died.
Britain had met the three big 18th-century cattle plagues by paying farmers to slaughter sick animals quickly, a policy pursued from 1714 by Dr Thomas Bates. This murrain, later called rinderpest, recurred. In south and east Africa it killed 80 per cent of cattle in the 1890s.
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