Silence of the Lambs (2002)
A four-part docusoap about farmers affected by the 2001 Foot-and-Mouth Disease outbreak captured both a strong sense of pride in family and community, and fierce hostility to the government.
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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.
Content warning: Animal death.
The period between the late 1980s and early 2000s was a challenging one for British livestock farmers, to put it mildly. First came the long crisis in the sector public image and economic fortunes caused by Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), aka Mad Cow Disease, and its failed regulation. Then came the 2001 Foot-and-Mouth disease (FMD) outbreak, which though far shorter in duration, met with drastic and controversial government intervention, including mass culling of animals.
North Yorkshire-based film production company Cheeky Monkey filmed a four-part series for ITV Yorkshire about the local impact of the 2001 FMD outbreak, entitled Silence of the Lambs, which was screened the following year. In its style and tone, the programme really I think captured something of the cultural and political zeitgeist of its period, and the place of the countryside in national life, in a way that I think makes it worth revisiting. Helpfully, all four episodes are available via YouTube.
The 2001 Foot-and-Mouth outbreak
The 2001 outbreak was first detected at an Essex abattoir in February. By early March, over 60 individual cases had been recorded across 18 separate counties, and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food (MAFF) had implemented a travel ban on livestock and began culling animals on infected premises. At this point, prime minister Tony Blair and his Downing Street staff took far more assertive control over the issue. They introduced a more draconian policy whereby, in the event of a new case of FMD being discovered, all livestock on those premises had to be killed inside 24 hours, and all livestock on neighbouring premises killed inside 48. The Army were also brought in to assist in the culling. Recognising the negative economic and political repercussions of these actions, and with a general election looming, the government dialled back the rhetoric and partially relaxed its measures. The final new FMD case was reported in Cumbria at the end of September, with the last culling of animals occurring on New Year’s Day 2002.
There were a number of factors involved in the outbreak and its severity. It was in part a matter of contingency, including the initial inaction of the Waugh brothers, owners of Burnside Farm in Tyne & Wear, where the disease was sourced back to. There was also the nature of the livestock industry in the UK itself, involving storage of large numbers of animals on single farms and their long distance transportation, increasing the likelihood of disease spreading. There were multiple failings on the part of the British state, including organisational failings within MAFF, New Labour’s susceptibility to public and media opinion, and the disconnect between the data the government was working with and acting upon on the one hand and the situation on the ground on the other. More broadly, the European and wider international regulatory framework was also flawed, rewarding countries that managed to remain FMD-free without the use of vaccination programmes (and thus making occasional more severe outbreaks more likely).1
Unlike BSE, FMD cannot generally be transmitted from animals to humans. Yet the 2001 outbreak had severe ramifications in a number of other ways. According to government estimates, over six million animals (particularly sheep) were culled during the epidemic, often in inhumane ways, while its cost to the UK economy was calculated at £9 billion. Research conducted among farmers revealed a deep sense of often concealed trauma over the high loss of animal life, and significant resentment over the marginalisation of their expertise by the state. Other studies demonstrated considerable concern in rural communities more generally about the economic implications of the epidemic, and disapproval of the government’s handling of it, while the general tone of press coverage evoked a strong sense of fear. The government itself responded by replacing MAFF in June 2001 with the new Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra).2
Silence of the Lambs
Cheeky Monkey Films was set up by film producer Paul Edwards and his wife Karen in the North Yorkshire village of Eshton in February 2000. They recorded Silence of the Lambs in villages of the surrounding Yorkshire Dales between May and December of the following year as the crisis unfolded and then receded. It was made with the agreement of local farmers upon whom it primarily focused, with some featuring throughout the course of the programmes, following them in their farming work as well as in aspects of their home and social lives, and capturing their reactions to developments, such as new outbreaks and the killing of livestock, as they unfolded.
There is a striking contrast between this miniseries and the earlier coverage of BSE by long-running current affairs programmes such as World in Action, with their usage of on-screen graphics and text, and credentialed talking heads. Silence of the Lambs was in one sense much more naturalistic, with its focus on the ordinary and everyday, absence of any overarching expert voices, and reliance entirely on footage of rural life in-situ. Yet this was knitted together in such a way as to emphasise the personal highs and lows of the different farmers, whom we are invited to view as characters in a small-scale drama, albeit ones who routinely break the fourth wall. Their stories were narrated soberly in a voiceover by Lancastrian-born news presenter Christine Talbot, as well as sometimes through non-diegetic use of their own voices, while the morose tone was also captured through the usage of downbeat contemporary pop music, such as Coldplay’s piano-driven ballad ‘Trouble’ on the introduction to the first episode.3 This fly-on-the-wall docusoap approach was very much of its era, capturing an ostensibly authentic ordinariness and striving for a grim disaffectedness, yet achieving this mood in subtly manipulative ways.
Farming, family, and gender
From the outset, Silence of the Lambs presented farming as a vocation and duty, which provides those called to it with a dwindling monetary award. One of the most prominently featured farmers was Philip Metcalfe, who had recently taken over the running of the family farm from his father (and whose sister Kate was one of the programme’s producers). He claimed that ‘People are born and bred into farming’. Introductory shots of him working on his farm are interspersed with that of him playing in the garden with his wife and two young children. The intergenerational nature of farming was also demonstrated in the case of Anthony Dean, who ran his farm with the help of his sons Angus and John. The programme thus placed the connections between reproduction as a socioeconomic and biological process firmly in the viewer’s mind.
Silence of the Lambs also depicted farming as an extremely homosocial world. It showed women and girls are shown engaging in farm work, but relatively sparingly, and never explicitly as heads of the family business. The programme captured the close connection between family and farm life, but also made the distinctions between work and domestic spaces clear, not least in emphasising the discomfort of male farmers spending more time inside the home because of the disruptions to their business. It celebrated through these men a certain brand of rural Yorkshire masculinity: blunt and gruff (though not necessarily humourless); embodied in outdoor, manual work; and taciturn and stoic in the face of misfortune, albeit also with displays of emotion such as outbursts of anger at perceived official incompetence, or quickly suppressed grieving.
Human-animal relationships
At the source of this emotionality was the farmers’ relationships with their animals. In some instances this was shown to be approximate to the affection of a conventional animal lover or pet owner, in a manner easily comprehensible to those without a background in farming. At the start of the first episode, the audience are introduced to farmer David Sayer amid a herd of sheep. ‘They’re me friends’, he explained to the camera. ‘I’m a loner at heart, but if I’ve got me sheep round me, I’m alright, I’m happy, I don’t need ‘owt else.’ There are also depictions of farmers’ young children having strong connections with individual animals, naming them, and expressing a sense of ownership over them. The farmers subsequently often explained their response to the culling of their stock in similar terms. Anthony Dean, and another farmer, Michael Harrison, likened it to ‘a death in the family,’ while Philip Metcalfe asserted: ‘It’s just like somebody walking into your living room and shooting your pet cat or pet dog in front of you. It’s no different feeling to farmers losing their animals…you’re just losing it on a bigger scale.’
This evades a related issue, however: that a large proportion of the animals culled during the FMD epidemic would have instead been slaughtered for their meat. Silence of the Lamb avoids this question entirely; where actual production of animal-based goods is shown, it is the milking of cows or shearing of wool from sheep. Yet the scale of farming does clearly alter the relationship between humans and animals, and the farmers talk far more commonly of the animals in collective rather than individual terms. The tragedy they evoke is that of the elimination of life itself, and with it the disruption of the rhythms and spaces that farming is built around, lamenting the sights of empty fields and barns, and particularly the killing of calves and lambs. Footage filmed from a distance of animals being shot in their fields or carcasses disposed of by machines adds a detached absurdity to affairs, communicating both the ease with which life is extinguished and the industrial scale at which it is occurring.
Again socioeconomic and biological reproduction are connected: the premature slaughter of young animals prevents their stock from renewing itself and also threatens the likelihood of the continuation of their family businesses, and of their way of life. Narration on the programme routinely stressed the loss in economic terms, comparing the government compensation received by the farmers unfavourably to the market prices they would have received for the same animals alive a year previously. This is also a loss on their investment of time itself: as the Dean family and neighbouring farmer Lister Walmsley (who is also recurringly featured over the miniseries) watched their animals being killed by marksmen, Angus Dean remarked ‘It will take years, won’t it, to restock’, while Walmsley described it as ‘Just a lifetime’s business wiped out in hours’.
Community and locality
A further integral theme in the programme is the sense of community forged through farming, and its centrality to ideas of place. Silence of the Lambs is very conscious of the Yorkshire Dales’ status as a heritage sport and rural idyll. Its opening narration describes it as ‘a special mix of rolling hills, dramatic valleys, and chocolate box villages. A landscape of lonely barns, drystone barns, and manicured fields, dotted with animals.’ Immediately afterwards, we hear Philip Metcalfe explain ‘The reason the countryside looks as it does, is because of the way people have farmed for the past hundred years’. We also learn that the Dean family’s history of farming near Grassington can be traced back to the thirteenth century. This connection between farming and locality is further emphasised through demonstrating concern over FMD and its impact beyond just farmers, including the local church, which held a special ‘foot-and-mouth service’, captured in the third episode. Farmers are likewise depicted as similarly communally minded, as when Lister Walmsley is shown in the first episode trying to dissuade officials from culling animals at the point in the day when a bus returning children from school would be passing the fields.
This communal-mindedness echoes throughout the four episodes, which lay out the connections between work and local leisure spaces. Michael Harrison is shown in Episode 2 coaching Wharfedale Rugby Club in his spare time. ‘When the auction mart was open, on a Monday morning, the topic of conversation would be rugby. And at the rugby matches, on a Saturday, often the topic of conversation is often farming. So it’s completely and utterly interrelated.’ Later in the same episode, we learn of the existence of the ‘Dirty Farmers’ Club’, an unofficial gathering at a local pub of farmers who have lost all their animals. Yet for the most part, FMD is characterised as having impeded rather than enabled the flourishing of social life. We learn, for example, that many farming families have become wary of making social visits that might unwittingly result in spreading the virus. The narration in the fourth episode refers to ‘a feeling of isolation’ endured by farmers that the autumn reopening of Skipton auction mart helped to alleviate, describing trips there as ‘more of a social event than a place to trade’.
Yet we also get a hint of pre-existing social demarcations and divides that become more evident as the epidemic proceeds. There is the contrast between the long-established farming families and someone like David Sayer, who had only recently obtained his own flock having previously worked as a shepherd for other farmers. We learn at the end of the fourth episode that Sayer was forced by financial circumstances to give up part of his flock and take a part-time job milking cows, whereas the Dean family and Philip Metcalfe able to welcome new life again onto the farms with the coming of the new year. Moreover, while those working in tourism and hospitality occasionally featured on the show expressed sympathy with the farmers and recognise the need for biosecurity measures, they also remark upon how restrictions like the closing of footpaths through the local countryside have badly affected their own custom. The difference in their interests is perhaps best demonstrated in Episode 3 by the arrival of a grouse shoot, with Defra’s permission, in the vicinity, described by the watching Lister Walmsley as ‘rubbing muck in t’public’s face’.
The state, expertise, authority, and resentment
Yet the principal antagonist of the programme, more so than selfish grouse hunters or even FMD, is the state. It manifests in different guises throughout the miniseries, from the Army and its marksmen in the earlier episodes to inspectors from Defra in the later ones. While these individuals may occasional speak to camera and come across reasonably sympathetically, it is clear that they are playing walk-on parts in the farmers’ show, and we are never invited to identify with them to any real degree. The only instance where a representative of the state is really depicted positively is in Episode 4, when Prince Charles is shown making a visit to Skipton Auction Mart. He was received there by Anthony Dean, who described it as ‘comforting to know that Prince Charles is taking a very keen interest in what happens in rural North Yorkshire’. Charles is shown to be following the same biosecurity measures that the farmers are; his fondness for the Dales is referenced in the narration, while Dean noted his awareness of ‘the psychological effects that people have gone through with foot-and-mouth’.
This deference towards and feeling of being understood by a figure of traditional authority contrasts with the contempt the farmers generally exhibit in Silence of the Lambs towards the technocratic apparatus now far more heavy-handedly governing their affairs. The programme often implicitly stresses the seemingly excessive nature of measures like culling healthy animals because of the presence of FMD on nearby farms, as well as the bureaucratic workings of government. Farmers often referred contemptuously to having to abide by decisions reached in remote urban locations, while some of those interviewed mockingly referred to Defra as ‘Death Row’. Episode 1 gives particular attention to some of Philip Metcalfe’s animals being mistakenly culled because, in his words, ‘somebody couldn’t read a map properly in Leeds’; MAFF’s handling of the entire incident and its aftermath is characterised as error-strewn and insensitive.
The farmers’, and wider community’s, anger at the government, evident throughout, manifests most sharply in Episode 2 with a public meeting at Skipton Town Hall, at which multiple attendees voice their anger at government policy. The meeting was addressed by local MP, former Conservative agriculture minister (and at the time chairman of the Agriculture Select Committee) David Curry. Yet while he was sympathetic to the farmers’ plight, the crowd directed their anger at him too as a representative of politics more broadly, booing his remark that ‘I’m telling you what can be done; we have a parliamentary system’. A subsequent speaker told the crowd: ‘We’re here, we’re in Yorkshire; we’re straightforward-speaking Yorkshire people. And there’s only one way to do the job, and that’s do the bugger yourself.’ This localist, anti-government, producerist sentiment, pitting farmers as commonsensical, hard-working businessmen against an incompetent state intervening in their sphere of work, echoes throughout Silence of the Lambs, such as in Episode 1 when, watching a botched culling and disposal operation, Lister Walmsley remarked ‘If the buggers worked for me, I’d sack the buggers’.
Yet the irony of the situation is that as the epidemic proceeded, the farmers became increasingly financially reliant on the state, in compensation for culled animals, or later in funding the deep-cleaning operations they conducted on their premises. Most notably, with farm work halted, Angus Dean is shown taking a job working for Defra in Episode 3. His father Antony, who in Episode 1 said ‘I couldn’t work in a town or a city, it’d kill me’, comes across as ambivalent about Angus’s decision, given Defra’s poor reputation with farmers. He added laughingly, ‘When he’s been a penpusher for six months, sitting in a nice warm office, I’m not so sure that he’ll want to come back to milking at six ‘o’ clock in the morning.’ Angus seemed to excel in his role, principally because he remained an insider who could identify with the farmers he was a caseworker for. One of those, John Croft, described him in Episode 4 as ‘one of Defra’s best men, because he has common sense, and half of Defra men have about as much common sense…as a telephone pole’, much to Angus’s amusement. At the end of the episode, on New Year’s Eve, Angus reflected that ‘If I had a wish, I would love to have back every single cow and sheep that I’ve lost’, demonstrating his continued commitment to the family farm.
Reflections
Watching Silence of the Lambs back, more than two decades on, a couple of things struck me. The first is the parallels between the 2001 FMD epidemic and the COVID pandemic that commenced in 2020: the limitations on movement; the forced closure of premises; the extension of the state into other aspect of everyday life; the fear for one’s livelihood in these changed circumstances; the heightened evidence of inequalities; and the pervading sense of isolation and loss. The second is the noteworthy paradox that the increased presence of the state in people’s lives, ostensibly for the preservation of their livelihoods, fuelled populist, anti-technocratic sentiment and rhetoric in that particular locality and moment, which would subsequently become far more widespread and electorally significant.
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On the various causes of the FMD outbreak and its severity, see:
David Campbell and Robert Lee, ‘‘Carnage by Computer’: The Blackboard Economics of the 2001 Foot and Mouth Epidemic’, Social & Legal Studies, Vol. 12, No. 4 (2003), pp. 425–459.
J. C. Gibbens, J. W. Wilesmith, C. E. Sharpe, L. M. Mansley, E. Michalopoulou, J. B. M. Ryan, and M. Hudson, ‘Descriptive Epidemiology of the 2001 Foot-and-Mouth Disease Epidemic in Great Britain: The First Five Months’, Veterinary Record, Vol. 149, No. 24 (2001), pp. 729–743.
Matt J. Keeling, Mark E. J. Woolhouse, Darren J. Shaw, Louise Matthews, Margo Chase-Topping, Dan T. Haydon, Stephen J. Cornell, Jens Kappey, John Wilesmith, and Bryan T. Grenfell, ‘Dynamics of the 2001 UK Foot and Mouth Epidemic: Stochastic Dispersal in a Heterogeneous Landscape’, Science, Vol. 294, No. 5543 (2001), pp. 813–817.
John Law, ‘Disaster in Agriculture: Or Foot and Mouth Mobilities’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, Vol. 38, No. 2 (2006), pp. 227–239.
Alan McConnell and Alistair Stark, ‘Foot-and-Mouth 2001: The Politics of Crisis Management’, Parliamentary Affairs, Vol. 55, No. 4 (2002), pp. 664–681.
M. D. F. Shirley and S. P. Rushton, ‘Where Diseases and Networks Collide: Lessons to be Learnt from a Study of the 2001 Foot-and-Mouth Disease Epidemic’, Epidemiology & Infection, Vol. 133, No. 6 (2005), pp. 1023–1032.
On the consequences of the FMD outbreak, see:
Cathy Bailey, Ian Convery, Maggie Mort, and Josephine Baxter, ‘Different Public Health Geographies of the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease Epidemic: ‘Citizen’ versus ‘Professional’ Epidemiology’, Health & Place, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2006), pp. 157–166.
Karen J. Cannon and Tracy A. Irani, ‘Fear and Loathing in Britain: A Framing Analysis of News Coverage during the Foot and Mouth Disease Outbreaks in the United Kingdom’, Journal of Applied Communications, Vol. 95, No. 1 (2011), Art. 2, doi: 10.4148/1051-0834.1171.
Ian Convery, Cathy Bailey, Maggie Mort, and Josephine Baxter, ‘Death in the Wrong Place? Emotional Geographies of the UK 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease Epidemic’, Journal of Rural Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2005), pp. 99–109.
S. M. Crispin, P. A. Roger, H. O’Hare, and S. H. Binns, ‘The 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease Epidemic in the United Kingdom: Animal Welfare Perspectives’, Revue Scientifique et Technique, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2002), pp. 877-883.
Andrew Donaldson, Richard Lee, Neil Ward, and Katy Wilkinson, ‘Foot and Mouth – Five Years On: The Legacy of the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease Crisis for Farming and the British Countryside’, Centre for Rural Economy Discussion Paper Series, No. 6 (2006).
Wouter Poortinga, Karen Bickerstaff, Ian Langford, Jörg Niewöhner, and Nick Pidgeon, ‘The British 2001 Foot and Mouth Crisis: A Comparative Study of Public Risk Perceptions, Trust and Beliefs about Government Policy in Two Communities’, Journal of Risk Research, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2004), pp. 73–90.
I don’t think it gets more 2001 than having ‘Trouble’ played on a programme’s soundtrack.