How ‘cow Covid’ brought chaos and rage to France

After two nights of clashes, taunts and tear gas, a group of veterinarians finally step off an armoured police vehicle in Ariège, walking the last few metres on foot, past burning tyres and mobile phones filming their every move.

Their task is to euthanise cattle, hundreds at a time, to stop a contagious disease engulfing southern France.

Yet, for many farmers the vets are the sharp end of an overzealous tool of “total slaughter” reminiscent of Covid-era regulatory overkill, and they are prepared to take extreme action to stop it.

“We have experienced health crises before, but such an outburst of hatred is unprecedented,” says Matthieu Mourou, vice-president of France’s national veterinary order. “Intervening under police escort, with hundreds of angry people waiting, is something we have never experienced at this level.”

Online abuse has escalated. Some vets are being told: “Keep going like this and we’ll put your heads on pikes.”

The stand-off has left Emmanuel Macron, France’s already embattled president, and Sébastien Lecornu, his “soldier monk” prime minister, scrambling to avert a Christmas of discontent.

The protests have grown increasingly radical.

Near the A63 motorway in Ariège, farmers dismantled a speed camera that they said was “blocking tractors” and dumped it onto a bonfire, footage shared widely online showed.

Elsewhere, manure has been hurled at prefectures, slurry sprayed on state buildings and tyres set alight beneath motorway bridges, as tractors tore up barriers and turned infrastructure itself into a weapon of protest.

At the heart of the unrest is lumpy skin disease (LSD), a highly infectious viral disease affecting cattle. It is harmless to humans, but devastating for herds.

Since June, 113 outbreaks have been recorded nationwide, spreading from east to south-west France.

In response, the authorities have imposed a strict eradication strategy: the systematic culling of infected herds, bans on livestock movements and emergency vaccination within a 50km (30-mile) radius.

Veterinary experts insist the disease is too virulent to rely solely on vaccination. But for many farmers, the policy of wiping out entire herds for a single confirmed case has become unbearable.

For many, the fury is deeply personal. “The cows have names, they have their character, their history,” said Sarah Dumigron, a breeder in Gironde.

“I’ve cared for them at night, I work seven days a week with them. I’ll fight to the end for my cows.”

In Ariège, Florian Sabria said he had stopped sleeping. “If they slaughter our herd, we won’t start again. It’s the work of a lifetime – the genetics, the work of our parents and grandparents.”

Confédération paysanne, the Left-wing union, has branded the eradication policy “more frightening than the illness itself”, urging an end to the culls and calling for blockades “to put an end to this madness”.

The anger is being fuelled by a broader set of factors including collapsing farm incomes, regulatory fatigue, fears of cuts to the next Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) budget, and dread over the EU-Mercosur trade deal.

On Monday, the revolt spread beyond farmers themselves.

More than 200 mayors and local elected officials gathered outside the prefecture in Foix, in the Ariège, calling on the state to “urgently listen” and reopen dialogue with farmers, and demanding a rethink of the total culling protocol in favour of more targeted slaughter of infected animals.

Last week, Annie Genevard, the French agriculture minister, insisted she had no alternative.

“To save the entire industry, slaughter is the only solution,” she told Le Parisien.

She has repeatedly framed the strategy around three non-negotiable pillars – “depopulation, vaccination and movement restrictions” – arguing that this is what “science and veterinarians” recommend, and what “foreign countries have applied”.

With tensions rising, she travelled to Toulouse on Monday to launch the vaccination of one million cattle in the south-west of the country and struck a more conciliatory tone. “I’m a woman of dialogue,” she said, promising to examine all options.

It remains to be seen whether that message will calm rural France.

Across the south-west, farmers have blocked major routes, including the A64 and A63, dismantling motorway barriers and lighting braziers beneath overpasses. Protesters dumped straw, slurry and piles of used tyres outside sub-prefectures, setting up overnight camps that took on the air of rural sieges.

“We’re waiting to be received, and above all to be heard,” said Frédéric Meynard, a cereal farmer manning a blockade near Toulouse beneath a banner proclaiming: “Here continues the country of agricultural resistance.”

Interior ministry figures show dozens of protests actions and more than 1,000 farmers mobilised across the south-west. Paris knows how quickly such protests can escalate.

In early 2024, protesters threatened to “starve Paris” by sealing off access to Rungis, Europe’s largest wholesale food market, sending ministers scrambling to secure food supplies and prompting a wider debate about overbearing norms in the European Union.

This time, the dispute has taken on a distinctly Covid-like tone. Scientists and officials are accused of technocracy, blind obedience to Brussels and contempt for “common sense”.

Philippe de Villiers, the conservative polemicist, mocked Ms Genevard as “Doctor Véran in a skirt”, likening her to the former health minister who enforced pandemic restrictions. On CNews and Europe 1, presenters have warned of “sanitary madness” and even a “great replacement” of French beef by South American imports.

Yet the analogy with Covid scepticism is inverted. Many farmers are not rejecting vaccines; they are demanding them. Several unions want all cattle vaccinated and spared slaughter.

“It’s absurd and cruel to kill an entire herd for one sick animal,” said Emilie Deligny, secretary-general of the Confédération paysanne. “When a human is ill, we don’t kill the whole family.”

Veterinary authorities say this position ignores the biology of the disease. There is no treatment for LSD, tests are unreliable during a long asymptomatic incubation period, and the vaccine takes weeks to become effective.

“When one animal is sick, it’s wrong to say the others are healthy,” warned Jeanne Brugère-Picoux, a leading veterinary epidemiologist. “Most will become infected, waste away, and end up being euthanised anyway,” she told L’Opinion.

The stakes extend far beyond individual farms. At issue is France’s retention of its internationally recognised disease-free status, which underpins the free export of live animals and meat. Losing it would trigger trade barriers for at least a year.

Culture Viande, which represents slaughterhouses and meat processors, defended the French government’s line this week, saying the current measures were “the only system capable of ensuring effective sanitary protection and preserving France’s disease-free status”.

Any shift, it warned, would “inevitably” complicate exports and weaken France’s position on international markets. France exported nearly 1.3 million young cattle last year, mainly to Italy and Spain, worth more than €1bn (£878m).

Veterinarians have found themselves in the line of fire with Mr Mourou warning of fears of “irreversible acts”. He also cautioned that the crisis could worsen the shortage of rural vets as younger practitioners reconsider their future.

Leaping to their defence, Maud Bregeon, a government spokesman, said: “Forgive me, but the enemy is the virus.” Ms Genevard has echoed that message, pointing to Savoie and Haute-Savoie, where combined culling and vaccination eradicated the disease.

François Pernet-Coudrier, whose herd was destroyed in the Alps, said he accepted depopulation “to save the neighbour” and insisted farmers there were “still standing”.

But farmers’ fury is being driven by forces well beyond veterinary policy.

Many see LSD as one more sacrifice demanded while Europe tightens the purse strings. That sense of siege is heightened by fears that France, the EU’s biggest beneficiary of farm subsidies, could see its share of the next CAP shrink in real terms as Brussels reallocates spending towards defence, climate and industry.

“LSD is just one drop more,” said Arnaud Rousseau, president of the FNSEA. “It adds to falling incomes, new taxes, the carbon border mechanism, and Mercosur.”

Mercosur, a long-negotiated EU free-trade deal with Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, is bitterly opposed by French farmers as a source of cheaper beef produced under looser environmental and sanitary standards.

Paris says it cannot support the agreement “as it stands” and is pressing Brussels to delay any sign-off, even though it remains on the agenda around the Dec 18 EU summit.

For Mr Lecornu, the timing is perilous, coming just days after he secured a rare victory by passing the social security budget through a deeply divided parliament.

A spreading farmers’ revolt, with Christmas travel looming and the Mercosur showdown days away, risks becoming a fresh thorn in his side as his government struggles to get the rest of the budget over the line by year’s end.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]