Tour de France cycle race to cut short one of its stages<\/a>.<\/p>\nThe government’s policy of slaughtering entire herds where a single animal has been infected has run up against bitter opposition from two of the three main farmers’ unions.<\/p>\n
Conf\u00e9deration Rurale and Conf\u00e9deration Paysanne say the policy is being brutally applied, and is in any case unnecessary because a combination of selective culling and vaccination would suffice.<\/p>\n
But most vets disagree. <\/p>\n
“Right now we are unable to tell the difference between a healthy animal and a symptomless animal carrying the virus. That is the only reason we have to carry out these whole-herd slaughters,” said Stephanie Philizot who heads the SNGTV vets’ union.<\/p>\n
Since June there have been around 110 outbreaks of LSD in France, originally in the east but now increasingly in the south-west. Ministry officials blame the illegal movement of cattle from affected zones. Around 3,000 animals have been slaughtered.<\/p>\n
The French government is worried the protests could snowball into a wider movement among a farming population that feels itself under growing threat from the imposition of EU norms and competition from abroad.<\/p>\n
A big protest is planned in Brussels next week during the summit of EU leaders. Several French farming sectors are in deep crisis, from wine-growers hit by falling consumption to poultry farmers hit by avian flu.<\/p>\n
There is also widespread opposition to the impending signature of an EU free-trade agreement with South American countries, which farmers fear will open France to more cheap food imports, much of it produced under looser environmental and sanitary constraints.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Though mainly non-fatal, it can badly affect milk-production and the cows are unsaleable. The disease arrived in Europe…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":313245,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-313244","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313244\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/313245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}