A history of bovine tuberculosis eradication policy in Northern Ireland

Abstract

Despite many years of state-sponsored efforts to eradicate the disease from cattle through testing and slaughter, bovine tuberculosis (bTB) is still regarded as the most important and complex of animal health challenges facing the British livestock agricultural industry. This paper provides a historical analysis of the ongoing bTB statutory eradication programme in one part of the UK - Northern Ireland (NI) - which began in 1949 as a voluntary scheme, but between 1959 and 1960 became compulsory for all cattle herd-owners. Tracing bTB back through time sets the eradication efforts of the present day within a deeper context, and provides signposts for what developed in subsequent decades. The findings are based primarily on empirical research using historical published reports of the Ministry of Agriculture and state documents held in the public archives in NI, and they emphasize the need to consider the economic, social and political contexts of disease eradication efforts and their influences on both the past and the present.

Framing bovine tuberculosis: a ‘political ecology of health’ approach to circulation of knowledge(s) about animal disease control

“…For many, bTB is an everyday ubiquity, part of everyday farming life, and something to be coped with, and tolerated, rather than driven relentlessly towards elimination. This attitude markedly contrasts with the attitude at the end of the very successful first decade of the statutory programme in the late 1960s, when it was believed that bTB in N. Ireland was a problem of the past (Robinson ).…”

“…Within the European Union (EU), legislation requires the eradication of bTB from the territories of member states, primarily to facilitate the free trade of animals and animal products, but also traditionally and historically to protect human health. The statutory programme in Northern Ireland (N. Ireland) began in 1959 with the aim of eradicating the disease (see Robinson ), but nearly six decades later, bTB remains an expensive and frustrating problem for cattle farmers, state veterinary authorities, politicians and policy‐makers. All cattle are required by legislation to be tested at least annually for the disease at the state's expense, and positive animals are removed for slaughter with compensation to affected herd owners.…”

“…What are its impacts? Answers to those questions are important, for as Moda () has suggested elsewhere in Europe, social, non‐technical factors have an influence on bTB programme success, and Robinson () has already demonstrated that for this longstanding and intractable problem in N. Ireland, socio‐economic factors have had an important influence on the history of control. Are the political ecology of the disease and how it is perceived important factors in the conundrum of much effort for many years with less‐than‐satisfactory results?…”

Farmers and bovine tuberculosis: Contextualising statutory disease control within everyday farming lives

“…How important are the attitudes and behaviours of farmers in relation to statutory disease control? Historically, Robinson (2015) has shown that praise was showered upon farmers by state authorities in N. Ireland when progress was made towards eradication in the early years of the statutory scheme which had started in 1959, but this changed to apportioning blame in the mid-1970s. An influential audit report (NIAO, 2009) described how a minority of farmers in N. Ireland had not complied with legislative requirements on bTB testing, or had been involved in fraudulent activity such as deliberately interfering with the skin test sites on animals to reduce or create skin swellings.…”

The Badgers Have Moved the Goalposts!

“…While the unique history of the badger/bTB situation in Northern Ireland has been investigated, the critical experiences of people in the South West of England have yet to be documented. 42 Given that social research on bTB also points towards disjuncts in communication, engagement, responsibility, power and trust between central government and local actors as a key problem for bTB policy, the need to understand such histories is even more urgent. My work has also uncovered a further gap in the historiography of bTBwhile late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century debates have been extensively investigated, and this volume traces the situation since the mid-1960s, we still have a rather sketchy understanding of how the disease was (mostly) brought under control in the post-war period.…”