On the 25th anniversary of the foot and mouth epidemic, Herald writer Rosemary Goring asks why it’s important we remember that cataclysmic event.

The silent spring of 2001 is a time few of us who live in the country would ever want to revisit. My memory of it is made up of an album of snapshots. Squelching across disinfectant mats when visiting a farm. Smoke billowing over the skyline. The stench of cremated animals and kerosine. The silhouettes of cattle carcasses, hooves pointing accusingly to the heavens from their pyres. News footage of farmers barricading themselves in to prevent compulsory slaughter of their livestock. Empty green fields at Easter, where lambs should have been frolicking and cattle ruminating, and the sense that even the birds were quietened by the strangeness of it all.

That unforgettable year, it felt as if an annihilating form of war had broken out, turning the most beautiful and productive areas of countryside into sites of hidden devastation. Devastating, indeed, is one of the words most frequently used by those recalling the epidemic of foot and mouth disease that began 25 years ago this month.

On 19 February, 2001, a routine veterinary inspection at an Essex abattoir discovered the disease in pigs. Later its source was traced to a farm in Northumberland. The likeliest cause of the infection was infected illegally imported meat, which had been used in undercooked pig swill.

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