I do not want to make light of the fact that, somewhere in the Surrey countryside, a young cow is nursing a leg injury sustained when she was rammed by a police car, or that the officer who was at the wheel has been relieved of his frontline duties, but really…
When it comes to the grievous hurt that Britain’s animals have to suffer every day – the factory farming, the chickens unable to spread their wings, the pigs kept in cages not much bigger than their bodies, the genetic manipulation of cows, the breeding of attack dogs, and much more besides – Beau Lucy’s run-in with the Surrey constabulary hardly registers on the scale.
And the fact that this rather extraordinary incident has moved a nation is such a perfect exposition of our double standards when it comes to animals.
The reason why the case of Beau Lucy, a 10-month-old calf, has gained such exposure is, of course, because it happened in front of our eyes. Or, rather, it was captured on video, and shared millions of times on social media.
So, while it occurred on a suburban street in Staines, it felt like it was on our street. We don’t, in the normal course of events, get to see the aforementioned indignities suffered by other animals.
And if social media is in any way a barometer of national sentiment, we are all horrified by what befell Beau Lucy. Scroll through X, listen to the radio phone-ins, watch the TV interviews with onlookers – we are all, truly, disgusted that an animal could be treated in such a way.
This ignores the fact that, according to my local farming consultant, Lucy appears to be a beef cow, so she will live a relatively uneventful life (providing she steers clear of the rozzers) until the age of two, when she will be sent to be slaughtered before turning up again on our Sunday lunch plates. That our sentimentality about animals doesn’t appear to have any connection with the realities of food production never fails to astonish.
Jeremy Clarkson, who has done more than anyone to explain farming to a wider public, put it very well in the most recent series of his Amazon show, Clarkson’s Farm. Having decided to rear pigs, he was reduced to a blubbing mess as seven of his 28 new-born piglets died, one cradled in his arms in his study.
“All farmers love their animals,” he says, “and then they kill them and sell them.” And to make that point, he was, shortly afterwards, presented with several boxes of sausages, pork chops and back bacon, all of which came from two of his pigs who had lasted the course.
His quote can be adapted for the British public. “All Britons love their animals. And then they eat them. Without even thinking about it.”
A friend of mine, hardly a militant vegetarian, once said to me that you shouldn’t eat an animal unless you’d be prepared to kill it yourself. I wouldn’t quite go that far, but I do wish there was greater understanding of food production methods. And, even at a time when household budgets are under pressure, I wish that people might work out that the vast disparity in retail prices for, say, chickens reflected the relative standards of husbandry before said chicken reached your dinner table.
It is right that Beau Lucy’s misadventure should be taken seriously – it is horrible to watch – and Surrey Police has been moved to discipline the officer concerned. But let’s not get carried away. This was a highly unusual incident – my farming source said that he’d been to an abattoir and he’d never seen the staff there kill animals by “running them over”. And, while shocking, it’s a long, long way from the sort of cruelty we, the world’s most animal-friendly nation, inflict on animals every minute of every day.