Foot and Mouth – The Killing Fields in Wales (2021)

This documentary revisited the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak and ensuing animal cull in Wales, and its impact on the country’s farmers, in part through the prism of the recent COVID pandemic.

Footage of protestors against the disposal of culled animal carcasses in Epynt Valley during the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak, as featured on the 2021 documentary, Foot and Mouth - The Killing Fields in Wales (BBC Wales).

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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.

Content warning: Animal death; Descriptions of violence against animals.

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In October 2021, BBC Wales screened the documentary Foot and Mouth – The Killing Fields in Wales. Twenty years on, the programme reflected on how the 2001 outbreak of the disease in the UK – which the government eventually succeeded in bringing under control only after the culling of six million farm animals – impacted upon rural life and politics within Wales. It takes its audience through the initial discovery of the disease at an abattoir in Essex, subsequently traced back to a farm in Northumbria, to its detection in Anglesey and ensuing appearance on the Welsh mainland. As the UK government’s initial response proved inadequate, the culling operation expanded to include the entire stock of animals on farms adjacent to those where the disease had been found, even if there was no evidence as yet that those animals were not completely healthy.

The Killing Fields in Wales explored this process both through the perspective of Welsh farmers who were affected by the culling and of the scientists, veterinarians, and politicians tasked with planning and delivering the policy. These included Labour politician Carwyn Jones, the then 33-year-old Welsh Minister for Agriculture and Rural Affairs, who would later serve as Wales’s First Minister from 2009 to 2018.

The need to dispose of culled animals at a more rapid pace and on a greater scale prompted Jones and his team to settle on a plan of deploying the Army to bury them en masse in the Epynt Valley – a move that provoked fierce opposition from the local community, culminating in violent clashes between protestors and police. When the initial proposal to inter the animals deep in the ground proved unsafe, contrary to the Welsh government’s earlier claims, it instead opted to dispose of the carcasses on huge pyres visible across the valley. The documentary concluded with the disease having been finally brought under control, but farmers still bearing the psychological scars of the episode some two decades later.

Genre and memory

The Killing Fields in Wales told its story through a combination of archival and contemporary audiovisual material. The former included BBC news coverage, as well as footage from the media libraries of Imperial College London, the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, and stock media companies Getty and Shutterstock. It also comprised home videos recorded by farmers at the time themselves, on handheld cameras often provided by news companies for the purpose, as their own staff were not allowed on the farms because of the risk of cross-contamination.

The result was a record of the event that mixed the official with the intimate. The archive television coverage carried an air of authority, impartiality, and yet also familiarity in the recognisable reporters and politicians of the early 2000s; the visuals, from news graphics to modes of on-site reporting root the viewer in the telescape of that period. The relatively poor-quality handheld camera footage and amateur narration likewise serves to evoke the viewer’s own memories of contemporary domestic video recordings, and therefore further encourage their identification both with the farmers and period of history on display.

The documentary also included (uncredited) unseen voiceover narration, providing an overarching account that helps evoke a sense of chronology and historicity alongside the contemporaneity of the footage. It utilised stock music (as well as snippets of late 1990s/early 2000s rock songs by the likes of Radiohead) to subtly prompt emotional responses and a vague sense of period. Perhaps most crucially, it made extensive use of contemporary interviews with the same people who appeared in the archival videos.

The local cast of interviewees included farmers like Richard Rogers, Ann Morgan, and Gary Holloway; Anglesey veterinarian Meurig Evans, who identified the first case on the island; Nigel Picken, a long-distance lorry driver from Montgomeryshire employed to help carry out the cull; and Kate Nicholson, a chip shop owner who participated in the Epynt protests. Other interviewees represented the state and political response to the crisis: former UK Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food Nick Brown; the aforementioned Carywn Jones; Kirsty Williams, the then Liberal Democrat Member of the Senedd for Brecon and Radnorshire, the constituency within which the Epynt Valley lies; Welsh epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, who helped originate the mass culling policy; and Major Sean Walker, who was involved in overseeing the proposed mass burial operation.

This approach further established a dialogue between past and present, highlighting the continued contemporary weight and significance of the events of two decades earlier in a particularly personalised manner. The interviewees were generally shot in close-up, often with the backdrop out of focus; at times their own words were presented non-digetically, continuing to play over the soundtrack while they were shown instead communicating wordlessly through facial expression and physical gestures. These partial abstractions of interviewees from place and voices from bodies invite the viewer into an emotional time-space that operates between past and present, an immediate but nonchronological here-and-now. The usage of these techniques also extended to political interviewees as well, in a manner that is both humanising and subtly undermining of hierarchy.

Being made in 2021, The Killing Fields in Wales interpreted the memory of the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak through two particularly interlinked frames. The first of these was the COVID pandemic that had necessitated the shutdown of much of the UK’s physical public realm in the Spring of 2020 with recurring implementation of similar public health measures over the ensuing 12 months. The theme of an epidemic, albeit one among animals rather than humans, and the accompanying visual motifs of biosecurity wear, disinfecting stations, and medical equipment could hardly not spark such memories in the contemporary audience, but the documentary’s narration was none-too-subtle in drawing the parallels either, as evident from the very outset:

In 2001, Wales was in the grip of a hidden virus that brought the country to its knees.

The virus closed schools, brought tourism to a standstill, and cancelled major sporting events.

It locked down the countryside, and forced thousands to self-isolate.

The treatment of foot-and-mouth as harbinger of COVID, especially in its technological implications, was consequently reinforced through the documentary’s segment on Neil Ferguson, whose computer-based epidemiological modelling it identified as a precursor to his role in anticipating the scale of COVID’s spread and informing the resulting government policy of enforced social distancing. The programme also made mention of Wales having hosted the first-ever online livestock auction in 2001 due to restrictions on animal transportation and on human travel between sites of animal storage – nodding to the centrality of video calls to economic activity during COVID.

The idea of a Welsh experience of, and a specifically Welsh state response to, foot-and-mouth, similarly gained salience from the political changes that occurred since 2001, including the strengthening of Welsh devolution in that time. The focus on Carwyn Jones’ role during the outbreak, for example, was retroactively encouraged in part by his later becoming the country’s long-serving First Minister. Moreover, the emphasis on a particular Welsh approach to the disease again had heightened resonance given the experience of COVID, when public heath’s status as a devolved issue meant the decisions taken by Jones’s successor, Mark Drakeford, and his government had had a far greater bearing on Welsh people’s day-to-day lives.

Humans, animals, death, emotions, and the life-cycle

While not depicting the animal killings themselves, the documentary captured the horror of the cull and its scale through juxtaposing (archival and contemporary) footage of apparently healthy farm animals with that of the bodies of the culled ones, or of conspicuously empty fields and barns. The section on Anne Morgan, for example, opened with her helping a ewe deliver a new lamb in the present day, before later explaining to camera ‘Each Spring, just the same as in 2001, is always a time of thinking what good things lie ahead. Because Spring is new life.’ She then recounted the horror of learning in Spring 2001 that the vaguely possible presence of foot-and-mouth on her farm required the slaughter of her entire stock. The documentary next incorporated a home video of her barn filled with dead animals, over which she had then narrated ‘This is the shed where they were born, roughly five weeks ago. This was our main lambing shed; now it’s just a morgue.’

At other times, the violence carried out against the animals took on an almost absurdist turn, in images of carcasses being disposed of using crude industrial methods, whether being shunted or loaded by farm machinery or tumbling from flaming pyres. This was also the case with Nigel Picken’s at times slightly detached recollection of his participation in the cull. He explained:

Money talks, doesn’t it? And the government threw money at it, and we were taking it…gimme gimme gimme, really. Nobody wants to do it, but somebody’s got to do it, so…it was the same with the killing of these beasts, really.

Yet there was also an understatedly caring side to his description of the work. Gary Holloway, the farmer whose animals he was exterminating, was a close acquaintance: ‘We were drinking buddies, yes. I grew up with Gary.’ Holloway himself remarked:

He did say, ‘I hope you don’t mind that I’m actually here doing it,’ and I said no, like I said, I’d rather see someone familiar on the farm who would actually keep an eye on things for you.

Picken described the work itself very matter-of-factly:

There was four of us there, and I didn’t want them to think I was shirking my responsibility, or you know…shying away from the work. So I was really getting stuck in, so they christened me the Grim Reaper [laughs]…which I wasn’t sure about at the time. Looking back, I could say why they done it, because it looked like I was enjoying it.

Yet this too was balanced with a more sincerely empathetic recollection: ‘I wanted to get it done for Gary so he wouldn’t have to witness his own stock being slaughtered.’ This was followed with a present-day shot of some cows, and a further bittersweet anecdote from Picken:

The very last cow to be slaughtered…he went into the corral, and the marksman stood in front of him, with a shotgun, like this [mimes aiming a shotgun], and the cow turned to the right, so we walk round to face him again [again mimes aiming shotgun], lifted up his rifle, and the cow turned to the right…and he had to chase the cow about four times before he…before he managed to shoot it. [laughing slightly] It was almost as if the cow knew what was going on [looks away wistfully].

In the main though, The Killing Fields in Wales was more dedicated to exploring human rather than animal suffering. The interviews with middle-aged, mostly male farmers, interspersed with home videos of their younger selves (which in some cases they were themselves watching back), evoked a stoic rural masculinity. The documentary’s overarching metanarrative was that then they had then been ill-equipped to express the suffering they were going through, but now they were facilitated in hesitatingly communicating that trauma, at times seemingly choking back more openly emotional responses. This was nonetheless also presented in a way very much in keeping with the melodramatic conventions of historical documentary in the age of reality television.¹ The occasional usage of their testimony non-digetically while they were themselves shown not speaking likewise stood as metaphor for the challenge of verbalising what they went through.

In this way, the programme broadly characterised foot-and-mouth disease’s principal victims as the farmers individually and collectively, and by extension the rural communities they inhabited. Rarely did it tease out or challenge this anthropocentrism, although there was some implicit contrast between the farmers’ slightly different perspectives of events. Anne Morgan said of the slaughter of her own stock:

I felt I had a duty to my animals to stay there. You couldn’t just distance yourself from it. You heard it, you felt it, you saw it.

Sheep are killed. We can’t get away from that…but they’re never killed in such an environment. They just caught it, killed it, and threw it on the floor.

Similarly, Richard Rogers’ farmhand at the time, Sean Roberts, recalled that ‘Me and Rick had the- the worst job of all. We had to catch the little…young, pretty, white fluffy lambs…introduce them to [vet] Meurig [Evans], so he could get at the heart.’ Evans continued, ‘He was passing them to me and holding them up for me to inject, you know. It’s abhorrent to kill a young animal like that.’

Gary Holloway, by contrast, accepted an invitation for he and his family to visit a friend while the cull was carried out on his farm, ‘so we didn’t have to hear’ – though he afterwards recalled feeling compelled to watch ‘me animals’ burning on the pyre erected for the purpose. Later in the programme, he concluded:

People think foot-and-mouth was something that happened to the animals. Actually, it was about the human beings, and how it affected them. At the time, it was, ‘Oh it don’t matter. They’ll get over it.’ Not yet we haven’t.

Generally, human and animal life on the farm were subtly conveyed as in harmonious hierarchy, the reproduction of animals underpinning the equally organic reproduction of a way of life, both within one’s own life-course and between generations. As Anne Morgan said of her own animals:

I’d inherited the flock from my father, and grandfather; they were sheep that were born at [the Anglesey village of] Penmynydd, and it was years of our own breed, cos we never bought in other sheep.

The foot-and-mouth outbreak and ensuing cull instead disrupted this order of things. The documentary introduced Richard Rogers as both a recent college graduate who had just taken over the family farm in 2001, when ‘I was on a steep learning curve in terms of my career…I was young and enthusiastic’, and as a middle-aged farmer in 2021, reflecting upon that period with greater maturity and wisdom, but also a sense of black irony in knowing what came next. Gary Holloway’s son Tom, eight years old at the time of the outbreak, ruminated twenty years later:

When you’re that age growing up, pretty much the whole farm is kind of your own, sort of, like…miniature petting zoo. Growing up on a farm was really quite an idyllic childhood. When foot-and-mouth hit the farm, it was sort of a…brutal and very quick sort of pivot in my, sort of…day-to-day life.

He soon afterwards teared up at the memory of seeing the pyre burning upon returning home once the cull was finished. This was followed by a harrowing reminiscence by Picken about the pyre, that ‘a lot of the beasts were in calf, and the heat just…well the, you know, you could see the young calves being…dropping out.’ The interweaving of these accounts implied that for a young child to experience such an ordeal, and for a cow to die with her unborn calves at the point she was supposed to be bringing them into the world, were equally unnatural. Gary Holloway recalled trying to protect his son from the full scale of what was taking place; this was followed by footage of him in 2001 answering a question about whether he would like Tom to become a farmer, to which he replied, ‘No. Certainly going to steer him away from it…not after what we’ve been through.’

Present throughout these recollections was the notion that farming as labour, farms as businesses, were about something more than crude economics; they involved a worth that could not be realised through transaction, achieved only through the passing of time, and through inheritance. This was the system of meaning the cull intruded upon. The narrator explained:

As the number of animals being killed rose, so did the cost of compensation offered to farmers. Every animal’s value was calculated…but no amount of money could make up for the loss of animals farmed on that land for generations.

The politics of place, and the place of the state

The Killing Fields of Wales portrayed the foot-and-mouth outbreaks through geographies of proximity and seclusion, whose norms fully manifested only through their surprise interruption. It depicted an almost creeping integration and intensification of flows of farm animals and animal products as the prelude to the events of 2001: the frequent sale of livestock from one part of the UK in other parts of the country; their eventual conversion into food at abattoirs a long way from points of origin; and the ensuing importance of selling that food in international markets such as those of the EU, in adherence with accompanying food standards.

Yet the documentary therefore illustrated that when foot-and-mouth broke out, the speed and breadth of its spread was seemingly almost beyond the capacity of humans to anticipate and intervene. As Gareth Wynn Jones, a hill farmer from North Wales, explained: ‘I didn’t worry about foot-and-mouth because it was a long way away from us. You thought, well, this might not affect us. They’ll get it under control quickly.’ The epidemic disabused farmers of this sense of safety through distance, just as it brought those processes of circulation to a sudden halt. Now the presence of a highly contagious virus meant farms were almost always too close to the trajectory of the disease, and to each other.

Having conveyed the implication that modern industrial farming methods and their scales of operation had exceeded human comprehension, and that foot-and-mouth was a kind of reckoning for that, the documentary also captured a sense that the resulting forced isolation of farmers was an equally unnatural state of affairs. Gary Holloway, for example, described he and his family being unable to leave their farm while there was the risk of the disease spreading to their animals as ‘surreal’. Again, this was a story with obvious parallels with COVID, from its suspected zoonotic roots amid questionable safety standards to the sudden heavy constriction of all movement. Foot-and-mouth also involved an isolation that was not only physical but societal, in the way farmers’ and rural communities’ experience of it and the harsh conditions it imposed were only ever partly if at all visible to everyone else, help fuelling the feelings of repression and resentment many of the interviewees expressed in 2021.

The documentary did, however, construct a Welsh community of experience through its depiction of farmers identified as from different parts of the country, with distinctive regional accents, and a nod to bilingualism in a home video of Richard Rogers speaking in Welsh. The notion of a specific Welsh experience of a virus originating in Northumberland via Essex and of a cull ordered by the Westminster government might seem apt for a Wales-versus-England opposition. Yet The Killing Fields in Wales swiftly steered away from that framing about a third of the way in, at which point the narrator noted that ‘it wasn’t just decisions in London impacting upon Welsh farmers’, for ‘In 2001, there was a new devolved Welsh government, with some control over Welsh affairs.’

A different antagonism was therefore set up, between Welsh farmers on the one hand, and the Welsh government on the other. The documentary’s narration emphasised the experiential, social, and geographic divide between the two. The then newly appointed Welsh Minister for Rural Affairs Carwyn Jones was ‘an inexperienced former barrister with no background in farming’, managing ‘the day-to-day crisis’ with ‘an army of civil servants based in Cardiff’. Jones himself remarked during his interview:

Let’s remember that not three-and-a-half years beforehand there’d been a vote in a referendum where almost half the people of Wales had decided they didn’t want devolution at all. Anything we did, people expected us to fail.

Politicians’ lack of legitimacy, whether they were located in England or Wales, with people in the Welsh countryside was a continuing thread that reached its apotheosis with Jones’s advocacy of mass burial of culled animals in the Epynt. The memory of this decision and the fierce opposition to it was placed in the context of remembrance of an earlier local injustice, the 1939 Epynt clearances, when with war looming in Europe, the War Office forcibly removed over 50 local farms from their land, which it requisitioned for the purpose of establishing the new Sennybridge Training Area in their stead. Local MP Kirsty Williams recalled trying to persuade a seemingly blasé Jones about the inadvisability of his plan, explaining (against a visual backdrop of black and white photographs of local farmers taken at that earlier time):

There are people who live in this community whose families were dispossessed of their land…who had farmed on the Epynt, and the state had come along and cleared them off. Of all the places, where a government could come again, and try and impose on a community…those shadows of what had happened on the Epynt in the past I think certainly had a psychological bearing for some of the community.

The ensuing protests, at which Jones was confronted and criticised, possessed a carnivalesque quality, with participants dressed in hazmat suits, and carrying props such as a coffin bearing the epitaph ‘RIP Epynt’, and placards bearing mocking statements such as ‘EPYNT SPRING WATER AVAILABLE SOON WITH ROAST LAMB FLAVOUR’. These practices mirrored the dark absurdity of the cull and animal disposal themselves.

Despite, or perhaps because, of his extensive presence both as an interviewee and in archive news film, Jones rather came across increasingly as the documentary’s villain. His own soundbites, such as ‘I do remember thinking, if you get this wrong, you’re finished, and you’re thirty-three’, or ‘You know if you make friends in politics, you’re not doing the job properly’ chimed with its presentation of him as ruthless, career-focused, and slippery, a specifically Welsh avatar for New Labour’s approach to government. Moreover, it presented a recurring theme of presenting Jones then making public claims of being in control that he disavowed in his present-day interview, or as to the safety and efficacy of his carcass disposal plan that local common sense rejected and seemed subsequently vindicated in doing so.

Yet while implicitly disenchanted with politicians, whose past statements and actions swiftly betrayed the absence of the conviction and comprehension they affected, the documentary portrayed other forms of professional expertise involved in combating foot-and-mouth far more positively. As arbitrary as the culling policy seemed to the farmers interviewed, and as horrific as the accounts and images it produced were, The Killing Fields in Wales did not disavow precisely the type of abstracting epidemiological modelling practiced by Neil Ferguson which had underpinned it, presenting this rather as leading-edge scientific work. It was also sympathetic to veterinarians making difficult choices on the ground, as with Meurig Evans, whose decision to order the cull of farm animals across a large swathe of Anglesey Richard Rogers recalled equanimously and congenially, and whose own interview emphasised the gravitas and solemnity of his response to the situation.

Therefore, while Anne Morgan remarked at the documentary’s finale that ‘I will distrust the whole system till the end of my days’, the programme itself did not embrace such indiscriminate scepticism. Slightly beforehand, Carwyn Jones told his interviewer:

Epynt was absolutely key, unpleasant as it was for everybody, that’s what got rid of the disease. If we’d let it run through the countryside, we wouldn’t have farmers. They’d have been wiped out.

Against the images of burning animal pyres, the narration endorsed this idea that the decisions taken had been brutal but necessary, claiming: ‘The industrial scale destruction of over 60,000 culled livestock brought foot-and-mouth under control, and was a turning point in the epidemic.’ Coming in the wake of COVID, The Killing Fields in Wales’s conclusion seemed to be that the errors and dishonesties of the political class, particularly in a crisis, were near inevitable. Yet the intrusive power of the state when guided by medical knowledge had to be given the prerogative regardless, even to the point of infringing upon private enterprise and personal freedoms and inflicting unpleasant psychological side effects. In an age of ill-advised resistance to public health measures such as lockdowns, protective wear, and vaccines, a loosely directed, knee-jerk, wholesale antiestablishmentarian cynicism when faced with a disease like foot-and-mouth may have seemed an ultimately unaffordable indulgence.

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1. By way of a useful comparison with televised histories of war, I would recommend reading Maggie Andrews, ‘Mediating Remembrance: Personalization and Celebrity in Television’s Domestic Remembrance’, Journal of War & Culture Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3 (2011), pp. 357–370.