DAIRY farmers near Aberystwyth have spoken of the “devastating” impact of a 23 per cent rise in cattle slaughtered under a new bovine tuberculosis testing regime.
The 908 cattle from Ceredigion farms slaughtered in the 12 months to September make up almost a tenth of all those slaughtered across Wales, and represent a staggering 22.8 per cent increase on the 699 slaughtered in the previous 12-month period.
But farmers are questioning the accuracy of testing as figures show that following routine meat inspection after slaughter, TB was only detected in five of the 908 cattle.
The bacterium which causes bovine TB, mycobacterium bovis (M bovis), was only detected in a single cow of those slaughtered.
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Speaking to the Cambrian News recently, Llanrhystud dairy farmer Rhodri ap Hywel, 36, said that while he hasn’t been personally affected by TB, he knew plenty of farmers who have, some of whom have left the industry because of it.
“I don’t think people realise how much emotional stress farmers experience,” said Rhodri, who has a son with his partner Meleri.
“I think if people actually saw how much love goes into the job and the animals, they would see us differently.
“When you rear up calves, keep them and try to raise a good herd, and then all of a sudden you get a phone call saying 50 of your cows need to be culled.
“Worse is the follow-up phone call to say they didn’t have TB, and when you ask to have them back you are told no, because they have been killed.
“I know farmers who have packed up after that.”
Rhodri added: “I have been selectively picking cow semen to breed with particular cows in the herd to produce more productive cows.
“You build up, build up and build up and then that happens.
“Emotionally, it is absolutely devastating.”
Speaking to the Cambrian News, Prof Christianne Glossop, the chief veterinary officer for Wales, accepted there could be better communication with farmers, but said the postmortem test is used to gauge the progression of TB rather than test for its presence.
“When we slaughter an animal, they mainly go to an abattoir where we look for lesions,” said Prof Glossop.
“The animal is slaughtered, hung up and the meat inspector gets a matter of seconds to inspect that animal, looking at the lymph nodes and the alimentary tract for a lesion which could be the size of a pea.
“The reason we look to see whether the disease has progressed in a significant way is to establish whether it has been infected a long time.
“If we find a lesion, then we can take a very good sample for a microbiological investigation.
“But we might find an animal which hasn’t developed a lesion, which doesn’t mean it doesn’t have TB or M bovis.
“It is a bit of a paradox. The problem is that farmers don’t see TB-diseased cattle because we are testing frequently and removing them at an earlier stage.
“This can be distressing news from the farmer’s perspective because we send the animal to slaughter and more often than not, we don’t find a lesion.
“We then write to the farmer and tell them we didn’t find any lesions.
“I had a meeting with some farmers last week, and they were raising this — they said ‘we would rather not have that letter because it is upsetting’. Maybe that is something we could look at.”
The vast majority of the cows slaughtered in Ceredigion (812) were “compulsorily” killed after responding to a tuberculin skin test, or the ‘intereferon-gamma’ blood test.
But Mr ap Hywel claimed the new testing regime is not working.
“We are one of the most heavily regulated agricultural countries in the world. Then all of a sudden you are eating horse meat in a lasagne.
“They don’t even seem to be able to tell whether a cow has got TB or not.
“As a result, you have got the unnecessary cull of healthy cows and missed diagnosis of infected cows.”
Prof Glossop said the skin test was the “gold standard” of testing, with “over 99.9 per cent” accuracy.
“The test we rely on, the test that eradicated it from Australia and from New Zealand, is the skin test. That is the gold standard test.
“In particular, the specificity of the test — how accurately it identifies uninfected animals — is over 99.9 per cent.”
Elin Jones AM and Ben Lake MP were asked to comment but had not responded at the time of going to press.