The Foreign Service Journal, September 2003

one of them destroyed? How do you even consider starting over again? One family told me I was like their “funeral director.” They said I helped them through the grieving process that accompanies any death, even if it is “just” the death of one’s animals. But then I had to move on, for there were many more farms to visit and more cases of FMD to diagnose. I was happy on the rare occasions when I could say the animals did not look like they had FMD — yet. No Options On the more typical farms, where the news was not so good, I sat long hours with weatherbeaten farmers over a cup of coffee or tea while they contemplated how and if their farm was going to survive and what was going to happen next. When a farmer seemed particu- larly distraught, I called family members to try to arrange for someone to stay with him. I gave everyone the number of the local suicide prevention hotline and my cell phone number, and told them to call me any- time. Some did. They called me when they couldn’t take their cattle and sheep from winter to summer pasture because of the movement bans, and they pleaded with me to arrange for the slaughter of their prize breeding stock because they were calving in flooded fields and the newborn calves and lambs were drowning and there was nothing they could do about it. These ani- mals, like many others, were not sick. But the move- ment restrictions so essential to stopping the spread of the disease meant that some animals could no longer be cared for in a humane fashion. So we began killing animals for welfare reasons. At one farm, I oversaw the slaughter of an entire flock of purebred sheep, each worth thousands of dol- lars, to which the appraiser could only say that this was an “irreparable loss” to the breed. All I could do was make sure the killing was humane, for there was no option: it was just us in the face of over- whelming death and destruction. I tried to help the farmer and his fam- ily through those long, hard days, and they helped me as well. The days and weeks quickly became a blur. In all, over eight million animals were destroyed during the FMD outbreak. A third of these animals were killed for welfare reasons. Funeral pyres dotted the country- side. Looking for Scapegoats Naturally, everyone we met wanted to know what was going on, and whether we would be successful in eradicating the disease. Interestingly, they all assumed that someone had done something wrong, or failed to do something, and was therefore to blame for the epi- demic. The media were particularly interested in obtaining comments from the “foreign vets.” I was suddenly a minor media star, interviewed by numerous news pro- grams. I even appeared on the CBS national news! I often had to fend off leading questions from the British press, which would typically request an interview right before a high government official was scheduled to give a press conference on FMD. “And Dr. Sliter, what would you do differently than the English have done in trying to eradicate FMD?” Finally, it was time to leave and let the next group of American veterinarians take our places. In all, over 200 U.S. vets would travel to the U.K. during 2001 to help their British colleagues eradicate FMD, a tangible indi- cation of the support the United States gave the U.K. during this national crisis. We returned to our regular assignments at APHIS and elsewhere, but continued following the reports. We celebrated the U.K.’s success when FMD was offi- cially eradicated from the United Kingdom on Sept. 30, 2001. ■ F O C U S S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 37 The British media were particularly interested in obtaining comments from us “foreign vets.” Karen Sliter is a Foreign Service specialist with the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the Department of Agriculture’s quarantine agency.