- Location
- Carmarthenshire, West Wales
Why Geronimo the alpaca should be killed
In calculating animal welfare, the general good is usually more important than the individual caseCHARLES MOORE10 August 2021 • 6:00am
We commentators are conscious that, in the age of accusation by social media, some things that need saying become difficult to say. This can lead, as Sir Tom Stoppard recently put it, to “self-cancellation”. It is our job to resist that tendency.
In that spirit, therefore, and conscious that I write under the shadow of the animal equivalent of the gallows, I think it worth saying that Geronimo, the alpaca, should be killed.
Geronimo has been tested according to the rules, and twice been found positive for bovine TB (bTB). This process has been supported by a court of law, which upheld the validity of the tests. There are, of course, long-running disputes about the best methods of controlling the disease, but it is unfair of the alpaca’s owner, Helen Macdonald, to describe his cull as “barbaric”. It is the current norm, and must remain so until there is an effective vaccination against bTB. The motive for culling is a civilised one – to protect the species, and other species threatened.
In calculating animal welfare, the general good is usually more important than the individual case. If Geronimo’s infection is a danger to other “camelids”, and/or other animals, it is kinder to them to put him down. It is not cruel to him in the way such a policy would be cruel to a human being, because he is not a human being. He is sentient, but he cannot be terrified of his fate, because he knows nothing about it. He is not, as human beings are, morally autonomous.
George Eustice, the Defra Secretary, comes from a farming family which has had similarly sad bTB cases, and consequent cullings, among its pedigree South Devon cattle. As he says: “Each week, on average, we have to remove more than 500 cattle from herds due to infection in England alone.”
It is morally wrong that Geronimo should be reprieved because his owner loves him very much. Most people – farmers, riders, pet owners – love their animals. Most of them accept this should not exempt them from health rules.
Nor should Geronimo be privileged because people think he is lovely, cuddly, etc. That is simply a matter of human taste and shows no concern for actual animal welfare. It would be wrong to reprieve an alpaca on these grounds while cheerfully slaughtering a cow.
Geronimo’s vet, Iain McGill, said: “George Eustice has blatantly lied about the tests used on Geronimo.” That is not a professional way of talking. It is almost as bad as Boris Johnson’s father, Stanley, who describes the cull as a “murderous errand”.
Mr McGill goes on to say that Mr Eustice “has also made multiple false claims about the success of the badger cull”. That is the language of political campaigning, not science.
It is certainly sad for Ms Macdonald if Geronimo dies, but natural sympathy for her is an inadequate reason for overriding law, policy and wider animal welfare. If Geronimo could think and speak like a human being – and, I re-emphasise, he cannot – he could do worse than deliver, as his last words, the famous lines of Sydney Carton as he stands in for another and faces the guillotine at the end of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.”
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