The summary of the Phillips Report said:

Sheep have for hundreds of years been susceptible to a disease called scrapie. Many people were under the impression that this disease was transmitted to cattle, so that BSE was scrapie in cattle. This was reassuring because scrapie does not infect humans. We do not believe that BSE is scrapie in cattle.B.S.E. is a new, and more potent disease than scrapie. Nobody knows why the first cow or cows got B.S.E., but we believe that from this single source, infection spread widely in the British herd before anyone realised that a new disease had come into existence. This happened because of a long standing practice of making cattle feed out of the bits of the cow that are not fed to humans. Offal from the cow with B.S.E. probably infected the feed of many, and offal from those cattle infected the feed of many more. In this way B.S.E. spread rather like a chain letter and thousands of cows had been infected before the first cows were diagnosed. Changes in rendering methods had nothing to do with this.

Note that the Phillips Report itself conjectures 'Nobody knows', 'Offal from the cow with BSE probably infected the feed...', etc. Not exactly incontrovertible facts. It also argued that the belief that scrapie was the origin of BSE encouraged complacency. Since scrapie had not proved dangerous to humans, then most people assumed that BSE would not be dangerous either. Fine. But we can be quite sure that cows did not eat the offal of their own volition. And we can be equally sure that the entire process could have been halted if scientists had shown the same scepticism as environmentalists and anti-GM campaigners. If they had refused to be swayed by the demands of the animal foodstuffs industry. Indeed, if scientists and farmers had refused to listen to commercial entreaties. And if both had treated cattle as nature intended, as herbivores.

Where then are the Ministry scientists invested with a proper sense of enquiry, the official vets, the Government health officers, the think tank merchants who queried the crazy notion that the entire evolutionary process could safely be put on hold so that farmers could save a few pence a ton on cattle feed? Frankly they do not exist. Already Defra is taking us on another wild goose chase, deciding that badgers must be the cause of bovine tuberculosis and instituting a mass cull of wildlife in order to prove its surmise, having been engaged in the same nonsense for the past 50 years. And the same people are still spreading myxomatosis throughout the countryside in a mad hat scheme to eliminate an entire link from the natural food chain.

Yes PM, there are legitimate scientists. But they are not to be found in the ranks of Maff or Defra, that sad, blighted Ministry that never learns and never changes. Not very many of them are found in the Royal Society these days. They are to be found in Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, in Compassion in World Farming, in the Soil Association, occasionally in our schools and universities.

The Guardian's George Monbiot makes an obvious but withering observation: 'The rich are at play in the world's killing fields'. And he asks another very pertinent question, 'What will it take to persuade us to stop using the world as our punchbag?'