Ballymascanlon, Ireland — Agricultural officials in white coveralls prepared Thursday to kill and burn an estimated 40,000 animals as the Republic of Ireland confirmed its first cases of foot-and-mouth disease.
For three weeks, Ireland's 3.7 million citizens had restricted their travel and other activities even going so far as to cancel St. Patrick's Day parades in hopes of preventing the livestock disease from reaching Irish herds.
"After all these nervous weeks, we were just starting to believe we'd beat it," said cattle farmer John Elmore, whose herds are about 10 miles from Thursday's confirmed outbreak on a sheep farm in the Cooley Peninsula in County Louth, near the border with Northern Ireland.
The entire Cooley Peninsula area had been subject to special restrictions and monitoring since foot-and-mouth disease was confirmed March 1 in a sheep herd across the border in Northern Ireland triggering fears it would spread to the Irish republic and its $6 billion-a-year livestock industry. The epidemic began in Britain a month ago.
"Do I go out and feed the cattle in my shed, or do I wait for the slaughter?" Elmore asked, his voice choked with tears. He compared the news to "a bereavement like I was losing my own wife."
Authorities announced that 3,000 sheep and 1,000 cattle within a half-mile of the infected farm would be slain first, and that about 40,000 livestock on the whole peninsula would be destroyed within the next few days.
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