Slaughter Begins After Irish Discover Foot-and-Mouth

Agricultural officials slaughtered the first of thousands of doomed animals today, a day after Ireland confirmed its first cases of foot-and-mouth disease.

Confirmation of the first cases on a rural peninsula Thursday sent shock waves through the country, and stocks slumped more than 5% on the Dublin exchange.

For three weeks, Ireland’s 3.7 million citizens had restricted their travel and canceled other activities, even their St. Patrick’s Day parades, in hopes of deterring the livestock virus.

“After all these nervous weeks, we were just starting to believe we’d beat it,” said John Elmore, a cattle farmer about 10 miles from the confirmed outbreak on a sheep farm next door to the British province of Northern Ireland.

The entire Cooley Peninsula, about 50 miles north of Dublin, the capital, had been subject to special restrictions and monitoring since foot-and-mouth was confirmed March 1 in a sheep herd near Meigh on the Northern Ireland side of the border. That triggered fears that the virus 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 Thursday before the killings began, his voice choked with tears. He compared the news to “a bereavement--like I was losing my own wife.”

Authorities moved quickly Thursday to try to restrict the disease to the Cooley area of County Louth.

They announced that 3,000 sheep and 1,000 cattle within half a mile of the infected farm would be slain first, and that about 40,000 livestock on the peninsula would be destroyed within the next few days.

In Dublin, Agriculture Minister Joe Walsh announced that Ireland will maintain its ban on exporting live cows and sheep and impose a temporary ban on exports of all meat and dairy products.