Letter: A dairy farmer appeals for help

Last Friday it was the cows that came to Paris, with the farmers' protest; yesterday it was the bullocks, but they had nothing to do with agrarian protest. They were the star turn in France's favourite summer television game show, Intervilles, and they had a considerably more difficult passage than the cows.

Market day used to be the high point of the week for Tony Flintoft who farms 800 feet up on the North Yorkshire moors. He would take the beef cattle he had reared from birth down to Northallerton and stand in the auction ring as the product of a year or more's hard labour was judged by his fellow hill farmers and bid for by the meat traders. Then it was home with the cheque.

The standards for organic beef and dairy herds do allow the use of a proportion of feed concentrates that are not of organic origin but these feedstuffs must still only contain plant protein. Since it is the Government's claim that it was animal protein which caused BSE, it cannot be right for you to suggest that organic cows might have eaten dangerous cattle feed too (Letters, 18 August).

Cows that eat bracken produce milk containing a potent carcinogen absorbed from the plant, according to new scientific research.

In St Lucia, people speak as freely about goblins as they do politics. The pantheon of Caribbean demons and demi-gods rivals even Hindu mythology

The world's a scary place. Hardly a day passes without another strange or tragic story of sudden unexpected disaster sprawled across the newspapers. Hapless holiday-makers are bombed at an airport in Spain. Language students are killed when their plane to Paris explodes. Saturday- morning shoppers in Manchester are injured by an IRA bomb. A woman walking home one afternoon with her children in peaceful Kent is beaten to death. Ordinary people doing ordinary things are struck unexpectedly by danger and disaster.

Agriculture industry leaders are to set up a full-time counselling service to cope with of the rising number of farmers being driven to despair by the BSE crisis.

A junior minister yesterday rushed to defend Douglas Hogg, the embattled Minister of Agriculture, during a Commons debate on a motion censuring him for "mishandling" the beef crisis. Replying to a Liberal Democrat charge that 60,000 cows - the latest addition to the cull - would be "wantonly sacrificed, just to save Hogg's bacon", Tony Baldry said his minister had "worked flat out" to try and resolve the crisis and secure a future for the beef industry.

Waiting for news of Major's "victory" in Florence, television news watchers will have been unable to avoid the following images: circular saws slicing through dead cows; spinal cords being teased out of carcasses and thrown into pails, and slopping skips of "specified bovine offal" being driven to specified bovine disposal sites. That this is interlaced with images of placid beasts being petted by worried farmers intensifies rather than dilutes the horror. Such footage usually concludes with a vision of bovine inferno, a hapless cow (rejected as unfit for what we now call the "human food chain"), legs in air, being fed into a glowing incinerator. This is a glimpse of what could end up as the cull of 1.2 million cattle: a cow city the size of Birmingham. Whimsical scruples, you might say. Cows die that we might eat them. It matters nothing to the cows that they will now die without our eating them.

The Florence meeting today will decide more than the future of British beef, says Paddy Ashdown

Courtney Sampson, who farms a 60-cow dairy herd near Tiverton, Devon, thought the Government's agreement to extend the cull as "ludicrous".

Beef crisis: Deal on lifting ban could bring higher death toll

THE MAIN CUTS OF BEEF