Champion bull to be mince after TB alert

ONE of Yorkshire's top cattle breeders has been told his champion bull must be sold for mince because TB has been found in his herd.

Ken Jackson, of Forlorn Hope Farm, Stubbs Walden, between Pontefract and Doncaster, gave up the fight for a second blood test on the animal last night.

He was also refused permission to save semen from the bull, for future breeding, because Defra said there was a risk, albeit small, of passing the disease on.

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The broader concern is whether Defra vets can explain his outbreak. It will take at least another week to identify the strain of TB and match it to known sources.

Many cases in Yorkshire are eventually attributed to cattle moved from further south, where TB cannot be stamped out because it is in the local wildlife. Cattle farmers fear it will make another jump north.

The outbreak at Forlorn Hope Farm comes less than nine months after the declaration of an official TB "hotspot", around three neighbouring farms in the Denby Dale area, 20 miles

away,

The neighbours had infected each other but the original route of the TB was never established – raising fears the worst had happened.

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Defra has been watching for possible escapes from this hotspot since last July and would have some explaining to do if the Jackson farm cases were traced back to it. But so far, nobody knows what the explanation is.

Mr Jackson, 65, runs a commercial beef herd of cross-breds, which he has run down from about 300 to about 100 over the past couple of years. But his pride and joy is his 40 pedigree British Blondes derived from the French Blondes d'Aquitaine.

The best of his two stock bulls, Hallmark Boxter, won its category in every show it entered last year and would have been worth five figures to another breeder. But it is one of eight animals identified as a probable TB carrier by blood tests.

Defra will pay compensation only at average meat market rates, which means around 2,500 for a bull too old to make best steak.

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Mr Jackson and his wife, son and daughter, are still waiting for the results of 20 more blood tests. They are also waiting for confirmation of TB in the animals slaughtered so far. Meanwhile, their cattle business is shut down for months at least and they cannot go on the show circuit this year.

Mr Jackson said: "The government website admits three animals in a hundred are wrongly diagnosed.

"A second opinion on the best bull of its kind in the country would have only taken a couple of days. But according to the inspectors, everything is black and white. He had to be put down to be on the safe side and if I would not take him in, the police would be called and he would be shot."

His daughter Kate McNeil, who works for the NHS but still helps at the family farm said. "It's heartbreaking. He was like a pet to me. We had to fight but in the end, everything the Defra people said made sense in a hard way. They did understand and they were as good as they could be."

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n The High Court in Cardiff yesterday rejected a challenge by the Badger Trust to the Welsh Assembly's plans cull badgers as part of its bovine TB control plan. The Welsh experiment will be watched with great interest by English farmers, who blame badgers for bovine TB.