By Barry Simpson
Another Vermont anniversary was marked on March 21 and 23, the 15th year after the Faillace and Freeman sheep flock seizures in Greensboro and Warren. Both flocks of East Friesian dairy sheep had been imported primarily from Belgium by Dr. Larry and Linda Faillace of Warren as the premier breed for establishing high-quality cheese production in Vermont. Initially supported by the USDA, the import project was complete when the agency, obviously operating at the bidding of the beef and drug industries, did a sudden about face acting through the Vermont Department of Agriculture. Both industries, heavily dependent on promoting the security of U.S. beef production, needed to shift the blame for the anticipated arrival of mad cow disease from Europe onto another animal species. Sheep were chosen, as the sheep industry has virtually no clout in Washington, and the Faillace and Freeman flocks became the target of a totally bogus quarantine and destruction program promulgated by the USDA with the Vermont Department of Agriculture acting as its clumsy intermediary.
Other state officials were pressured to support the seizure and U.S. Senators Leahy and Jeffords with then U.S. Representative Sanders appeared together on national TV giving their approval. Governor Howard Dean, MD, Federal District Judge J. Garvan Murtha and Attorney General William Sorrell also fell for the USDA’s sucker punch. To their everlasting credit, state Senators Anthony Pollina and David Zuckerman and then state Representative Kincaid (Connell) Perot of Warren resisted the seizure and spoke actively in opposition to it. However, their voices and written opinions as well as those of many other Vermonters were unable to stay the execution and even a federal court order to that effect was violated.
ARMED AGENTS
Despite an offer by Belgium to allow the flocks to be returned to their country of origin alive (it was blocked by the USDA), they were seized by armed federal and state agents on March 21, 2001, in Greensboro and on March 23 in Warren. These dates will stand as the darkest days of all time for Vermont agriculture. Ironically, they bracket the date of March 22, 2016, as the recent day of terror bombings in Belgium, a very tragic day for that country as well.
Both flocks were trucked to Ames, Iowa, and exterminated, and no trace of mad cow disease was ever found in them. The presence of the disease (scientifically, “transmissible” spongiform encephalopathy, or TSE) had not been found in any sheep before that time nor has it been identified in sheep since. Concurrent with the Faillace and Freeman sheep quarantine and eventual seizure, the Vermont Department of Agriculture was aware of breeding cattle in the state that had been imported directly from England, where the largest outbreak of mad cow disease had occurred. Also, there were known flocks of sheep in-state from the same regions in the Low Countries of Europe, but they had been brought in through ports in Canada and transferred to Vermont without question, as if of Canadian origin.
TSE NOT CONTAGIOUS
At the onset of the mad cow disease scare in England, scientific thought held that the disease was “transmissible” contagiously from one cow to another or from consumption by a cow or human of meat containing spinal cord parts of an animal carrying the disease. However, before the seizure took place, British farmer-scientist Mark Purdey began advancing a theory based on years of investigations in the field. Purdey’s contention was that TSE was not contagious at all but instead developed in cattle that were genetically predisposed to acquiring the disease when exposed to a specific set of environmental conditions. For TSE to propagate in an individual animal there has to be an absence of copper and high levels of manganese, silver, strontium or barium in its diet. Also required is the presence of regular or intermittent bursts of infrasound (sound below the level of human hearing) from industrial, mining or aircraft noises in the nearby environment.
Purdey gave a lecture on his findings to Rootswork at the East Warren Schoolhouse in 2003, while in the state trying (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to get approval for clinical trials of his theory at UVM or elsewhere. It was eventually verified with no credit to Purdey by a research team of Russian scientists at Auburn University in Alabama and the rights to their patented “discovery” were bought and buried by a law firm acting as a shill for the Bank of America. With industrial agriculture and drug companies owning and concealing rights to the origin of mad cow disease, it still occurs in roughly the same frequency that it did 15 years ago. The difference now is that no farmer or rancher sends a cow to the slaughterhouse if it acts like it has overt signs of the disease where it may be seen by a federal inspector.
TRAINING EXERCISE
For the Mad River Valley, the failed resistance to the malfeasance and criminality of the USDA invoked a responsibility to participate effectively in events and trends of worldwide significance. Tapped phone calls and emails, rallies (attended by a few mysterious provocateurs), several documentary films and Linda’s Mad Sheep book served as a training exercise and presaged other far-reaching group proceedings, often with food and music accompaniment, here in The Valley. A short list includes, but is certainly not limited to, the Big Picture Theater with its human rights focus, the Center for Whole Communities, Amurtel, Vermont Commons and 350.org with their active local participation, Global Health Media Project, Green Mountain Global Forum, Rootswork with its internet-streaming radio station WMRW, American Flatbread, Yestermorrow, Project Harmony, 1% for the Planet and more.
Fifteen years later, the Faillace and Freeman sheep seizure can only be considered a costly and misbegotten sham of industry-manipulated government fraudulence. But it played a large part in the realization by the people of the Mad River Valley that although they occupy a tiny geopolitical entity, they can and will play a determining role in the world outside its mountain boundaries.
Simpson lives in Warren.
