Scotland - TIME for the king to abdicate. It's been a bad week for Scottish farming. A television programme has shown one of our biggest piggeries apparently over-run with rats, Professor Pennington, our leading expert on food hygiene, has warned of dangers to human health, and a Scottish daily comic has put on record its view that the farmer, "the real swine, should never be allowed near animals or our food again." It would be bad enough if the man in question was some smallholder who had lost the place, but this is the biggest pig farmer in Scotland, the man who once controlled more than a quarter of all of Scotland's sows and whose Scotpigs controls one in seven of our sows. He is a pioneer and a leader of our industry. He is the founding chairman of our grain co-op, he is a former chairman of the pig breeder's association and he had one of the first two modern windmills in Scotland. He is Arthur Simmers from Bogfechal in Aberdeenshire. It is King Arthur himself. With memories of dead pigs among glaur, and rats swarming over the backs of sleeping porkers fresh in their minds, the housekeepers were choosing beef and lamb last week. Reports are coming in of pork sales down 50%. The reaction of the boys to all this is interesting - and it is different. There is the usual gallows humour which emerges every time farmers feel beleaguered, be it by foot-and-mouth, curried eggs, BSE or whatever. "There's Scotads, Scotpigs and now there's Scotrats." And at the Salmon Inn they say that pork's not selling very well just now so they're trying a new line in rat scratchings. They say it's a bad business if you can't have laugh about it, but then this is a bad business. Also as usual, we farmers are quick to point out that a lot of the horror about the Ormiston Piggery was nonsense playing on public ignorance. Much was made of the fact that the pigs were seen "wallowing in their own faeces". Well, I'm sorry, but given the chance that is exactly what pigs like to do. On my World Tour of Little Ardo, from which this epistle has been a small diversion, I noted the remnants of a pig arc in which I used to breed pigs. That is the system most favoured by animal welfarists. The piggies are born outside in fields where they tear joyfully about and live their first few weeks with their mothers before going inside to be finished on straw. The pig, being a very clean animal, immediately makes part of the straw shed their toilet and that part soon becomes, to human eyes, an unsavoury mess. Whether townspeople like it or not, the pigs will puddle about there and they won't wash their hands after it. Much was made in this awful publicity of the fact that two dead pigs were found in the pens and that one of them was being eaten. But it is just a fact that one in a 100 pigs dies suddenly of a heart attack. If a heart attack occurs after five o'clock at night there will be a dead pig in the pen until morning. And pigs are carnivorous, so what is all the excitement if one carcase is bitten? And the boys have been quick to point out that the SSPCA, which was called in to examine the piggery, found no case for the King to answer - not on grounds of cruelty to the pigs. They had food, water and a dry place to lie down. If the farmer could afford to feed rats as well, the pigs seemed unconcerned. Then there was the man on the BBC who said that the conditions similar to those at Ormiston could be found on any pig farm. Having called his pedigree into question Mossie encapsulated the resentment that caused. "I'll bet there's mair rats in his hoose than there is in my piggery." All this has been well rehearsed in the watering holes of Aberdeenshire. And yet it is a bit different. When the King hit the Sunday headlines with the "death pit" photograph showing a horrendous vision of dead cows and pigs in a decomposing pit open to the elements, the farmers pulled together. When he was prosecuted unsuccessfully for keeping a disorderly piggery near Dundee, and again when his company went bankrupt leaving a trail of disappointed creditors including many neighbours, his fellow farmers closed ranks and made his excuses. But not this time. There is exasperation that all the efforts to present the most acceptable face of Scottish farming have been frustrated again. While the rats were the only substantial complaint, it was pretty clear that Ormiston is a bit of a dungeon. The industry doesn't need self-inflicted wounds. Maitland Mackie who, as NFU pigs convener, did more than anyone to get Scottish farmers to adopt farm assurance schemes, while refusing to point the finger at the King specifically, has said of last week's events, "This sort of thing isn't good PR." There could be more PR disasters. We've seen what can be done with a cheap video camera. He cannot be enjoying it. He has lost the support of his fellow farmers. The King should abdicate.:
