The owner of Geronimo the alpaca is considering suing ministers over his death after tests failed to find evidence of tuberculosis.
Helen Macdonald, who is a registered veterinary nurse, told The Times that the prime minister and environment secretary must face “consequences”.
Macdonald is meeting her legal team today to discuss the possibility of legal action against the government for killing Geronimo and the damage to her alpaca business, which has not been able to operate for the four years that the animal was placed in quarantine on her farm.
“They tortured and killed a healthy animal,” she told The Times. “The culture results are negative as we expected, because you can’t create something that isn’t there.
“I got the results yesterday and they leaked it before I could speak to my legal team. It seems a bit weird to introduce another news story where they have messed up. They released this after 14 weeks and I expected them to wait until the deadline of 20 weeks.”
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Geronimo was euthanised on August 31 after police and staff from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) arrived at Macdonald’s farm near Wickwar, south Gloucestershire, and dragged the animal away to be slaughtered.
A post-mortem examination in September proved inconclusive as to whether Geronimo had the infectious disease and so bacteriological cultures were developed from tissue samples, which usually takes several months to get results.
The eight-year-old stud male was culled after he had twice tested positive in 2017 for bovine TB, after being primed with the tuberculin protein, which Defra injected into the alpaca to increase its sensitivity to the blood test.
Critics argue the Enferplex TB test, which identifies the presence of antibodies to Mycobacterium bovis, the causal agent for bTB, has not been validated in camelids for use with the tuberculin protein used as a primer to boost the antibodies in the bloodstream.
Macdonald and her supporters argue that this can produce false positive results and that Defra has not done enough research into its effects on camelids.
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Defra refused Macdonald’s repeated requests during a four-year legal battle for Geronimo to receive a third Enferplex test without priming, or for him to be studied as part of research into false positives.
Macdonald had assured Defra that if he failed the test she would have him put down. The High Court ruled in July that the animal could be slaughtered.
“They used an unsafe test, they knew it was unsafe and produced abnormal and false results,” Macdonald said.
“They kept saying it was a highly specific validated test and it wasn’t and they misused it. If you prime an animal before the test it is invalidated.
The alpaca breeder said there needed to be “consequences” for Boris Johnson and George Eustice, the environment secretary, as well as Christine Middlemiss, the chief veterinary officer.
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“Geronimo was never exposed to TB in New Zealand, as they said, and Boris Johnson should be picking up the phone to Jacinda Ardern and apologising for accusing her country of exporting a disease, when it didn’t exist,” she said.
“The government never contacted New Zealand and reported a notifiable zoonotic disease and that is because they knew he didn’t have it. That is the only reason they wouldn’t do that. The least you could do was let a country know they had exported an animal that was diseased, if you really believed it.”
Macdonald added that the government’s TB policy needs to be reformed.
“Disease is still spreading and animals are being tested with poor and untested tests, in the case of camelids,” she said.
“Nothing is going to bring Geronimo back and we have to move forward and do these tests properly.
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“I think the government has a lot of problems and it starts at the top and goes down to the person who came and tortured Geronimo.
“There needs to be consequences. Will we see it? I don’t know, but it starts with Boris Johnson, George Eustice and the chief veterinary officer. They all knew about it. Defra TB policy as a whole needs to change.”
Defra said in a statement that it “was not possible to culture bacteria from tissue samples” but said “this does not mean the animal was free of bTB infection because it had previously twice tested positive using highly specific, validated and reliable tests”.
The department said “additional bacteria culturing process carried out by the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) is not used to validate previous test results, but instead to identify which strain of the disease is present and help inform decisions on testing other animals in the herd”.
