Free I blame the scapegoats by John O'Farrell Page A

Spanish will say, 'Oh no - it's just like negotiating with Maggie Thatcher
all over again.'

I
blame the scapegoats
     
    I
December 2001
     
     
    It's
a mistake any of us could have made - spending three years studying cows
instead of sheep. I'm always getting those two mixed up. All right, so they are
the Institute of Animal Health, but it doesn't mean they can be expected to
spot all the subtle variations between every single species; to know the
difference between, say, a bank vole and a short-tailed vole, or a wood warbler
and a sedge warbler. Or a sheep and a cow.
    The
latest twist in the BSE saga is even more farcical than anything that has gone
before. In the quest to establish whether British sheep have contracted the
disease, scientists spent the last three years studying sheep tissue and
reached a distressing conclusion: the British flock did indeed have BSE. Except
the animal samples they'd been studying for three years were the wrong ones.
The creatures which they had diagnosed with mad cow disease were cows. The clue
is in the name. We shouldn't be too hard on them - this sheep/cow mix-up
happens all the time. Thousands of sheep farmers have recently realized why
they've been finding it so hard to make a living: they've been shearing cows
all this time. Last year in a packed Spanish arena, one bullfight had been
going for about half an hour, with the nervous woolly bull running away from the
matador and bleating occasionally, before someone in the crowd said, 'Are you
absolutely sure that
    is a bull? Because I
can't help thinking it looks a little bit like a sheep.'
    For future reference, sheep are small, with
thick white fleeces and go 'Baaa!', whereas cows are much bigger and go 'Mooo!'
I know it can be confusing, but they are professional biologists. If it's not
in any of their scientific manuals, there are some pre-school picture books
which set it out quite clearly.
    This
week's report into the fiasco points the finger at a laboratory in Edinburgh,
although no one seems very sure. What seems even more incredible is that nobody
noticed for so long. Lots of us have days at work when we feel we're wasting
our time, but three whole years down the drain must make you a little bit
depressed. And all because someone got the wrong bottle out of the fridge.
That's the last time he'll be making the tea.
    'Are you sure you put
milk in the mug, cos it tastes a bit strange . . .'
    'Oh sorry, I must have used the liquidized
cows' brains by mistake. It's not my fault, they've both got pictures of cows
on the side . . .'
    When BSE was discovered in the samples,
ministers seriously considered destroying the entire British sheep flock.
Fortunately they didn't have to take this drastic step, because all the sheep
had already been slaughtered during the foot-and-mouth epidemic a few months
earlier. The scientists' error was discovered only after a last-minute DNA test
on the samples. Well, they claim they tested the DNA - for all we know it might
have been a jar of sundried tomatoes. And now the report into the fiasco has
concluded that the standards of labelling and storage were well below
international standards. You don't say. Perhaps the description of the animal
samples was done by people who write posh menus. You could never write anything
as straightforward as 'Liquidized sheep's brains' - you'd have to write 'Cerveaux
de mouton presse a la formaldehyde' '. One theory is that
somebody got confused about the words 'bovine' and 'ovine'. Often scientists
use the Latin names for different species, but since the Latin for sheep is
'ovis', we should just be grateful that they didn't spend three years studying
a brand of sliced bread from Yorkshire.
    Who knows what other similar slips have
occurred in other government departments? For all we know, British jets might
have been bombing Uzbekistan for the past few weeks . . . Intelligence assessments
of Taliban positions are being carried out by MFI. Right now all sorts of
frantic