Great Mysteries of the Universe - Number 2,359.

When Foot and Mouth rears its ugly head (how's that for a ridiculous metaphor?), how come farmers who have to have their cattle destroyed blub on camera and tell anyone who will listen how heartbreaking it is?
Dairy farmers aside, what are these custodians of the countryside rearing their animals for in the first place? Maybe livestock farming is just part of some elaborate and yet so far fruitless plan to introduce ungulates into the wild? Perhaps farmers breed cattle purely for the company - you need all the friends you can get in East Anglia? Then again, is it that they are such committed "Greens" they have cows to keep down the grass and produce methane to power their Range Rovers?
The fact that I have yet to see a retirement home for cows and that Sainsbury's and the rest are always packed from floor to ceiling with bits of these animals tends to disabuse me of these theories.
I think the most commonly accepted idea is that farmers breed and rear cattle so that, just as the animals are getting to like life, they can be packed off, killed and then butchered for the rest of us to eat. Why then do farmers cry when someone other than their normal, psycho slaughterman puts a gun to the heads of their charges? Is it, do you think, that unlike in the abattoirs, they're not allowed to watch? Possibly. Is it that each dead cow represents a financial loss? Well, I think they get compensated, don't they? - you know, like in other industries where stocks turn out to be contaminated with something nasty?
I have no fucking time whatsoever for farmers! They have been outside planning laws which apply to the rest of us for years. They get paid to produce things when there is a glut on the market, they get paid for offering not to fuck up the countryside and turn it into a dustbowl, they pollute watercourses with their fertilisers, they fuck up the food chain with their pesticides - and they don't give a fuck about anyone else.
The squeeze is on them now, however. Big business and insurance companies currently own about 80 per cent of all farms in this country and the supermarkets are demanding more and more of the producers for less and less. Well, tough titty, fishface! Welcome to the fucking world. I don't remember those bastards taking to the streets to protest about what happened to the miners, the steel workers or the rest of us. "......and when they came for me there was no-one left to speak out."
Fuck 'em. Farmers can sod off to Grantham.