The Killing Fields

It is a ghastly sight. Giant cranes drop bodies of slaughtered animals onto large funeral pyres. The legs of the dead cattle stick out grotesquely as the billowing smoke clouds out the setting sun. And the scene repeats itself endlessly in the rural English countryside - the killing fields are truly what they are.
After the madness of the mad cow disease in Britain, it is now foot and mouth disease. The talk by the politicians, the media, the general public and of course, the "farmers" (as the industrialised cattle-raisers are called) is of economics. Hundreds of thousands of perfectly healthy animals have been killed to prevent the spread of diseases caused by man's inhuman and machine-like treatment of the hapless animals. And yet, when the media refers to the deliberate mass killing that is ordered by the government, the reference is to the loss of income, the blow to the British tourism industry, the defiling of the country's image, the damage to the ruling party's election prospects and so on.