THE ruin facing livestock farmers as Foot and Mouth disease spreads around the country should make us take stock of what is important in our countryside. It is time to stop the endless bickering about fox-hunting and concentrate on the damage which this disease could do to rural life.

The fox-hunting lobby would have us believe that the countryside will end if their hobby is curtailed. But it is nothing in comparison to the damage that foot and mouth will do if it is not stopped.

In 1967, when the last major outbreak occurred, dairy and livestock farming was devastated, but farming as a whole was in a much better state then it is now and had the resilience to recover. Farming was the countryside then, a way of life, a vocation that people were born to and followed as faithfully as a doctor or teacher. It reflected firm values, respect for nature and for your neighbour.

Much of the heart has now been knocked out of farming as a way of life and it is increasingly dominated by big business values and trading in agricultural commodities.

The foot and mouth epidemic shows this clearly. It started in a farm where animals were in transit to anonymous slaughter at the other end of the country and is spreading round the south-west as a result of a business which can best be described as shuttling animals round the country in order to buy and sell at the best price. The animals might as well be copper or cement, or sterling, just another commodity.

It is the small, family farmers who will bear the brunt of this epidemic, those who have spent a lifetime building up a herd of cattle, sheep or pigs. But will there be a community left to support them this time, when it is all over?

C G J TUCKER, Throckmorton, Pershore.