Federal agents wearing bulletproof vests yesterday swooped down on a sleepy Vermont farm and seized a flock of sheep possibly infected with a type of deadly “mad cow” disease.
The extraordinary move was the first of its kind in the United States, which until now had all but escaped the mass hysteria sweeping Europe.
“They very quietly went off to their slaughter . . . It was the silence of the lambs,” said a grieving Linda Faillace, whose 140 farm sheep are next on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s hit list.
Houghton Freeman, owner of yesterday’s doomed flock, was too devastated to be at his picturesque farm when the sheep were led off just before 10 a.m., his lawyer said.
In his place were the farm’s two shepherds, quietly weeping as they helped load their 233 young charges onto trucks to take them to an Iowa lab – and their death.
“It was very sad. They [the sheep] just followed the buckets of grain,” said Freeman’s lawyer, Thomas Amidon.
As for Freeman, “he is very sad and disappointed,” Amidon said. “The disappointment is that a different result couldn’t have been reached by his own government so that it wasn’t so draconian.”
But USDA officials said they were only doing their job of safeguarding public health.
The department “has no choice but to take this decisive action based on the threat the sheep pose to the health of America’s livestock nationwide,” said Craig Reed, administrator of the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
The flock is one of two that had been quarantined in Vermont since 1998, after four of the animals showed signs of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, or TSE, according to the USDA.
TSE is a class of neurological diseases that includes mad-cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE) and scrapie, a sheep disease that poses no threat to humans.
While there has never been a reported case of a sheep contracting BSE outside the lab, the USDA says it doesn’t want to take a chance.
The always-fatal human form of BSE is contracted by eating contaminated beef. It is blamed for at least 80 deaths in Britain.
“It’s possible for sheep to contract the cattle version of the disease. We don’t know,” said Jim Rogers, a USDA spokesman in Vermont.
The USDA says it needs to kill the sheep and test them for both diseases. The experiment will take at least two to three years because the diseases’ incubation period is that long, officials said.
The government says the sheep may have contracted mad-cow disease or a new species of scrapie after eating contaminated feed before they were imported here from Belgium in 1996.
The animals have been used for breeding and for milk for fancy cheese, some of which has been served in upscale New York City eateries.
There is no known transmission of either disease through milk, scientists say.
The only known potential concern to U.S. residents in the past occurred when some 50 imported sheep were sold locally in Vermont for meat before the quarantine, federal officials said. But studies since then show that risk of contamination was very low, they said.
Freeman, Faillace and her husband, Larry, took their case to court, where they argued that the tests showing the animals have TSE were flawed and should be redone.
But a circuit court struck down their plea for a stay last week, paving the way for the stunning government move.
Dozens of agents, cops wielding handcuffs and overall-wearing USDA veterinarians arrived at the farm in the darkness around 6 a.m. to get the sheep, Amidon said.
The Faillaces said they are braced for a repeat of the horrific scenario at their own farm as early as this morning.
The USDA has said only that it will seize the Faillaces’ animals “in the next three weeks.”
“They want to do it in the cover of darkness to make it as stressful as possible for us,” Larry Faillace said.
“This is a lot of hysterical garbage . . . We’re extremely angry and saddened that the government can do this to us. Most of all, we feel sorry for our sheep,” he said.
The USDA has offered to reimburse the farmers “fair market value” for the animals.
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WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT
TRANSMISSIBLE SPONGIFORM ENCEPHALOPATHY, or TSE, is the umbrella term for a group of debilitating neurological diseases that includes mad cow disease, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob and scrapie.
“MAD COW” DISEASE, a k a Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), is the fatal disease in cattle that turns the brain into useless sponge. It has so far been known to be contracted only by eating the meat – especially the brain and spinal cord – of other contaminated animals. The disease was first identified in the 1980s in Britain.
VARIANT CREUTZFELDT-JAKOB: This is the type in humans believed to be caused by mad-cow disease, specifically from eating the contaminated meat of bovine. The symptoms are similar to that of mad-cow: As the brain deteriorates, memory, coordination and behavior grow progressively worse. It is ultimately fatal. The first human victim identified as having contracted the disease through tainted meat was in Britain in 1995.
SCRAPIE: A neurological disease so far found only in sheep and dating back to the early 1700s. It has only been known to be transmitted through placenta. Infected animals at first show symptoms of excitability, then grow progressively wobbly and uncoordinated, to the point where they can’t get up, and die.