Britain’s Forgotten Pandemic: What We Failed to Learn from the Outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease

In 2001, the UK faced one of its biggest crises since the Second World War when disease broke out across its hills and fields. An illness named foot-and-mouth. Between February and October, it led to the culling of an estimated ten million animals, first the infected, then the healthy to act as fire breakers, and throughout, whole corners of the country were quarantined. Yet, by 2002, the culling was all but forgotten as attention turned to the war on terror out east.

I grew up in the Lake District, one of England’s last patches of hinterland, and knew the epidemic mostly by its aftermath. The Lakes is in a county called Cumbria: a part of Britain insulated from centuries of invasions and civil wars by its ancient tradition of mountainside sheep farming.

Foot-and-mouth likely reached the UK in 2001 via pigs fed on contaminated swill near the Scottish border. Specifically, the pigs at Burnside Farm owned by a man named Bobby Waugh, around fifty miles from northern Cumbria. By year’s end, northern Cumbria would become the UK’s worst hit region and seventy percent of its livestock would be exterminated.

As a ten-year-old, my memory of the outbreak was looking at the charnel smokestacks as we drove over disinfectant-soaked carpets. The Lakes was closed to outsiders, farmers’ children were pulled out of school, and there was a sense that something was very wrong.

However, once it tapered off, I, like the rest of the country, came to forget the worst of it—but not what the virus left behind. A community put firmly in its place. The quiet feeling that no one cared had been made real and so had the anger and distrust that came with it.

Fifteen years later, that same phrase, “left behind,” would define a new political class. Brexit was the nucleus of a million think pieces but there was nothing uncertain about its origin. The England only seen from train windows. Its old mills and mines and marketplaces. Its fishing ports and seaside towns. Its rolling hills and punchline cities. The Empire’s long dead workhorse.

The Borrowed Hills began as an attempt to write about the left behind. Not as metaphors in a tale of kitchen sink realism but as the heroes in a story that cared about them. I was jealous of American writers because they had the Western. Beneath the gunfights and the Stetsons was the cowpoke, a working-class farmhand, and a thirst to understand America.

Luckily, few places in England are better suited to a Western than the stark hills of Cumbria. And it was here, trying to turn my home into the Wild West, that I kept coming back to foot-and-mouth.

The disease itself was nothing new. It’s endemic across the global south and outbreaks came and went in Britain throughout the early twentieth century. The last great outbreak in 1967 provided an important lesson: start the killing quickly.

It’s named after its symptoms—blisters in the mouth and on the feet. Any animal with cloven hooves—goats, sheep, pigs, cattle, free-roaming wild deer—can get it. In 2001, zoos locked up bison, gazelles, and giraffes. It’s rarely lethal for adults but the money in farming comes from young animals and sick dairy cows make bad milkers.

A vaccine has existed for over seventy years, but vaccinating against foot-and-mouth isn’t simple. There are many strains of virus and many types of animals. There is also the cost. International trade loves standardization and in 1992, the EU decided a slaughter-only policy was cheapest: a policy pushed enthusiastically by the UK.

Meanwhile, farming was becoming more intensive and interwoven. Warnings grew that an outbreak could be more explosive than before, but others, more confident, said that if it came, it would be swiftly stamped out.

The first confirmed case of foot-and-mouth was in an Essex slaughterhouse on February 19, 2001—soon followed by a European ban on livestock exports from the UK. By this time, infected animals had made their way to market and cases were found far away as Devon.

After a thirty-year lull, the ministry of agriculture was unprepared. Testing was slow and a new order came in. All livestock within three kilometers of an outbreak were to be culled. The countryside was shut down and an army of veterinarians, knackermen, soldiers, and body haulers were sent in.

These animals were bred for slaughter but not entire farms and not all at once. Upper estimates would put the death toll at an average of 300,000 a week. The animals couldn’t be taken to abattoirs and were instead culled on-site with firearms and lethal injection. In some cases, carcasses were left for days, rotting near the farms they came from, before being burned on pyres and buried in trenches. The slaughter teams were not trained for this scale of death or the endless smoke and stench.

It wasn’t just scenes of mayhem and corpse fires that were forgotten. It was the lies and the confusion. Fears the disease would spread to humans or that mass burials would pollute the ground. Word spread that forced culling of healthy animals wasn’t legal. Mass protests took place in London and on the frontlines, with a police officer in Wales crushed by a bulldozer while trying to stop campaigners.

And it was farmers who were blamed. They brought it into the country and didn’t stop it in its tracks. It was rumored they wanted an outbreak to get a generous pay out, that infected corpses were for sale on black markets. The confusion reached a pinnacle at Great Orton airfield on April 4th. Two slaughtermen were stood among a pile of dead sheep, struggling to carry on, and lost in the noise and smell, one took his bolt gun and mysteriously fired it into the other’s head.

As with many calamities, foot-and-mouth wasn’t taken seriously until celebrities were involved. In this case there were two: Phoenix the calf and Grunty the pig. Phoenix made front-page news when she survived the cull under a pile of incinerated carcasses before going on to lead a healthy life. Grunty was a film star, the lead in Ritz the Pig, who lived on a condemned farm in Somerset.

After a court challenge, the judge found that as Grunty was a healthy pig; the Government had no right to kill him. Amid concerns that farmers with uninfected stock may have been misled or bullied, the policy of mass extermination was wound down. By the end of summer, the number of cases would also wind down until September when the outbreak was finally over.

Interest in the disease died long before the virus. Newspapers became bored of gruesome images and with city folk allowed back in the national parks, their sympathies waned.

Before the end, the ministry of agriculture, MAFF, was reformed into a new organization named DEFRA and a full investigation into their handling of the disease was deemed too lengthy and too expensive. Thousands of farms were left empty and eight billion pounds of damage was done but little was heard of what came next.

We don’t have to look far to see what the real cost of forgetting is. Alt-right militants, European nationalism, sectarianism worldwide: all risen from people who were, one way or another, abandoned. Left behind with nothing but time to ruminate. This is the place two shepherds find themselves at the cliff edge of my novel, lost in the ashes of foot-and-mouth, looking for someone to help them find a way out.

There is an overlooked truth that the vulnerable are often the most dangerous. Almost no films, novels, or documentaries exist about the disaster, and I didn’t want readers just to remember this point in history, I wanted them to be locked in a room with it and the unheard anger, ready to tear their throats out.

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The Borrowed Hills by Scott Preston is available via Scribner.