As a dog of the world, I would be the first one to defend the freedom of the media, but with freedom comes responsibility. It’s the reason I am, on balance, happy to stay a pet, the freedom might be attractive but I don’t fancy the responsibility. You may wonder what has bothered me, well it was Yahoo yesterday. It ran a headline which says ‘return of mad cow disease warning’. Now, if you read that you would rightly think that we may have another problem with the likes of Daisy and Ermintrude, who are standing in the field down the road. But you’d be wrong. Daisy and Ermintrude are just fine and, but for the fact that they’re enjoying life at the moment, they are still as happy to be eaten as they were before.
The headline should fall under the Trades Descriptions Act and be outlawed. What it meant to say was ‘the incubation period for the human form of mad cow disease may have been longer than they thought and there may still be cases out there from before’. Isn’t it hard enough for our farmers to make a living as it is, without the press spreading misinformation that will scare people off? Misinformation is fine for wartime when you want to confuse the enemy or the cat down the road, but when the country is already in recession our businesses need all the encouragement they can get. It’s bad enough having other EU countries suggesting we are ready to join the Euro, without them finding an excuse not to eat out produce, again!
I shall be wandering down to give Daisy and Ermintrude a comforting pep talk later just so that they know I shall be as happy to eat steak as I was before.