Farmers Building up Resistance

Mass Slaughters Are a Violation of the Universal Order
The word for FMD in Masai is a synonym for influenza

Bad news is spread on the village markets along the Rift valley in Kenya where each week the Masai herdsmen and their herds gather. The word goes among these cow breeders, wearing their traditional red capes, that far away in Europe cows are being killed and burned, and their ashes buried, as an apparently efficient means of combating FMD. The culling comes as a shock to the Masai cow breeders, who have learned that this disease does not affect human beings. In their eyes mass slaughters are a violation of the universal order and an attack on bovine cosmogony, which teaches the Masai that ‘all the herds on earth’ are their potential property and that cows may well be objects of desire and greed, but never of destruction.
In front of Ntulele’s corral, a group of corrugated-iron huts about a hundred kilometres south-west of Nairobi, Daniel Tirati complains about this crime violating the Masai understanding of humanity. The news of this distant and inexplicable massacre almost moves him to tears of anger: ‘Our fathers taught us that the cows belong to us. So what gives Europeans the right to kill their animals? They live too far away for us to raid them and take away their flocks and herds. But if they do not want them, why not give them to us? We would be prepared to buy them!’ After these words, one no longer dares to spell out the real extent of the disaster – several hundreds of thousands of slaughtered animals.
‘Other animals in the bush may become infected, too. Buffaloes sometimes mate with heifers; giraffes drink from the same water supplies as other herds. Do the Europeans intend to eliminate them all?’ The indignation is also strong because in Kenya FMD is looked upon as relatively benign; the Masai term for it is a synonym for influenza. ‘Nobody would kill a man because he is suffering from influenza, would they?’ asks Daniel Tirat his listeners uncomprehendingly. ‘Each infected animal is isolated from the rest of the herd and taken care of in the “sacred forest”, on top of a mountain, and given extracts of barks, acacia and roots. Within less than a month it is well again.’
This form of quarantine is especially effective as it is accompanied by vaccination campaigns organised by the veterinary services in all areas affected by the virus, for the modest sum of only 40 shillings (3 francs) per animal. The European countries have given up vaccination by claiming that it would lead to confusion in the diagnosis of contaminated animals, and to a ban on animal exports. But Kenya is not an exporting nation, at least not officially. If its animals sometimes pass the border, it is as stolen property. ‘Pokots, Marakwets, Samburus and others, they all want our cows’, explains Daniel Tirati. The distribution of automatic weapons from neighbouring Somalia and the Sudan has transformed these raids into real massacres whereas in former times they used to add ‘a bit of spice’ to the breeders passion. Recently such a raid in the west of the country cost 80 lives. But not a single cow was hurt.