AS the Mad Cow disease scare rages - driven by the fears of a public that has, understandably, lost trust in government reassurances - there is a danger of misguided emotion turning on the beleaguered farm and beef industries.

For now that the spectre is raised of mass slaughter of cattle to curb the BSE epidemic and, moreover, win back the now-devastated confidence at home and abroad in British beef, the prospect of the huge compensation bill is bound to anger consumers and taxpayers.

That is because, already considering itself as having been seriously and, perhaps, deliberately misled by government and the farm lobby over BSE, the public may find it hard to understand why it must now suffer in the pocket.

For the knee-jerk response may be that farmers have visited the misfortune on themselves in the first place by turning grass-eating cattle into cannibals by giving them unnatural feedstuffs made from slaughtered animals.

Furthermore, the spread of BSE through farm herds and into the food chain may have been assisted by greedy farmers passing off infected cattle as healthy at market. But it has to be remembered that for all the financial self-interest that may pervade the history of the BSE plague, most farmers are hard-working, honest people and were, like the vast majority of us in this business, in the hands of experts when it came to the use of the new type of cattle feeds from which this whole scare stems.

They are as much unfortunate innocents as any who have suffered or may suffer from this dreadful disease.

Additionally, theirs is an industry which we cannot afford to see ruined and is one which, however many poor cattle may have to be killed to defeat this curse, we must see restored to health and viability eventually.

Otherwise, this country's self-sufficiency will be wrecked, with consumers at the mercy of foreign suppliers, while countless thousands of jobs are lost at home.

That would be the mad price of an emotive response over the bill for BSE.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.