If one compares what the British did to the vast cattle herds in the UK back when Madcow was just starting out...to what they might do in the US...there might be some shocked farmers. If someone were to draw a 400 miles circle in Alabama and Mississippi, and order all cattle to be killed in the interest of a federal order....the locals wouldn’t stand for it...nor would they accept a cash distribution for each animal killed. You would be talking about an entire lifetime of livestock gone. The American public has no idea what the federal government is capable of...and if they knew...they’d be firing senators and congressmen in a hurry.
There are more cattle in the US than there are people in the UK. (93 million cattle in the US vs. 60+ million UK citizens).
There are more hogs in the US than there are people in the UK - 65 million vs. the aforementioned 60+ million.
Then when you add in sheep, goats, etc — you end up with some huge numbers here in the US.
The value of the cattle market in the US today is over $74 billion per year. Dunno what the hog market is worth off the top of my head, but it is big too.
But what people don’t consider in these scenarios is the loss of tourism, hunting, fishing and other activities of high dollar value to rural areas. All travel of vehicles and people in rural areas must be restricted to clamp down on a FMD outbreak. In order to allow vehicles to pass into rural areas and know a priori that there would be no transmission, you’d have to pressure-wash vehicles, trucks, etc with a hot water and bleach solution.
In the end, the UK ended up killing over 10 million cattle and hogs and the rural economies were cratered.
Here in the US, it would be an even bigger impact, because we’d see the malfeasance and incompetence of the gooberment flatfoots in controlling the US/Canadian and US/Mexican border come to light — something that the UK could control much more effectively with their being an island. There is so much movement of cattle over the US/Canadian border that the US/Canadian border would have to be shut down and all cattle movements stopped. You’d see Canadian farmers/ranchers crater as well, since they’re tied at the hip with the US markets - we saw that pretty effectively during the BSE case (ie, “the cow that stole Christmas”).
IMO, there is subversive, concerted effort to destroy the final remnants of self-reliance in the American people. The purpose is to crush a cultural threat to the final socialization of the Government and make the people subservient to corporations for their food sources.
This goes hand and hand with the proposed USDA RFID tags on every cow, sheep, goat, pig, chicken, turkey and horse in the country.