Officials kill pet goat,
arrest owner

It will be a year ago April 5 that Kirstin McBride, then 21, a booking agent at the ScotRail station in Lockerbie, Scotland, received a phone call from her mother, Elizabeth Walls, urging her to leave work and drive home as quickly as possible. A veterinarian who had telephoned three nights before, but whom she had never met, had arrived at their cottage claiming he was there to kill the family's pet baby goat, Misty.

Despite having no papers authorizing the task, the vet insisted he was acting under orders and that it was necessary as part of the British government's effort to eradicate foot-and-mouth disease, which was raging out of control in a wide swath up the west side of the British Isles, from Devonshire in southwest England to the counties along the border between England and Scotland.

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Kirstin McBride. Photo by Astrid Goddard for Sovereignty, with permission.

During the 25-minute drive from Lockerbie to her home in Mouswald, a small rural community near the city of Dumfries, McBride called her stepfather, George Walls, from her mobile phone and begged him not to allow anything to happen to their pet until she got there. Walls locked the tiny goat in a shed to keep her safe.

Misty was especially dear to McBride and her parents. They had chosen her the previous July when she was just 2 days old and fed her by hand from a bottle. Only recently was she beginning to eat solids. In a tribute piece written a few months later for posting on the Internet, McBride describes Misty as a "a little character" who would come into the cottage to sleep by the fire and liked to go for walks with the pony and dogs, "the cat following behind." "She loved biscuits (cookies), … and we loved to watch her eat and the way her wee mouth moved from side to side. Her tail would wag like a dog's when she was happy. … We were a big, happy family living peacefully in the quiet countryside."

On March 1, less than two weeks after foot-and-mouth was officially recognized at a slaughterhouse in Essex, a county east of London, the dreaded disease had reached Dumfriesshire in southwest Scotland, and government squads were moving throughout the county to "kill out" the farms, leaving them empty of sheep and cattle. A neighbor of the Walls had his livestock slaughtered on March 22, having been diagnosed with foot-and-mouth. Government officials at the time told the Walls that their goat did not need to be killed. Nonetheless, the family set up its own disinfecting procedures. The pony and Misty were kept in the barn when anyone dropped by to avoid possible contagion, and visitors were disinfected.

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Misty, the pet goat. Photo by Kirstin McBride.

Mrs. Walls told WorldNetDaily that at no time did the goat have any physical contact with animals on neighboring farms. Moreover, she did not refuse to have Misty culled. She stressed that at no time did she refuse to have Misty killed, if it were truly necessary.

"I was asking for blood tests, and if they had been able to prove to me that she was putting other animals at risk, I would have been prepared to give her up," she said.

It was still early evening when McBride arrived in Mouswald, and she was startled to find two cars and a Land-Rover van blocking the road to the cottage in such a way that she was forced to park behind them. Two men whom she did not know tried to stop her – one she soon learned was a veterinarian; the other, an official from the Scottish Executive Environment and Rural Affairs Department, or SERAD, the agency charged with implementing the policies adopted to control the disease.

According to Mrs. Walls, the second man did not identify himself as such at any time that evening, and when she asked him later who he was he told her he was "only the driver."

The SERAD official grabbed McBride, saying she could not go to her home as it was an "infected area," but she broke away and ran toward the cottage. It was too late. Misty's body – "our darling baby goat" – was lying at the side of the road, a black plastic bag over its head, killed by a lethal injection.

She started screaming.

Mrs. Walls was in the kitchen talking with two police officers: Sgt. Aileen Graham, 38, and Constable Rory Caldow, 30, from the Dumfries Constabulary. Graham had said an official from SERAD would be coming to talk with them, when McBride burst into the room shouting hysterically, "Misty's dead! Misty's dead! They've killed her."

Mrs. Walls tried to assure her daughter that their pet was in the shed, but she was adamant, so Mrs. Walls decided to check.

The officers reportedly stepped in front of the door to block the two women from leaving the house, but they "managed to escape" and ran up the road looking for Misty's body, which in just a few minutes had been removed. The family's two dogs were loose, sniffing the ground where it had been lying, and McBride stopped to return them to the yard.

Mrs. Walls remembers the next few minutes as though they were yesterday.

'She bit him, he jumped'

"I was running up the road and heard Kirstin screaming again," Mrs. Walls recalled. "I thought, what's going on? I turned around, and this policeman [Caldow] was holding Kirstin. I ran to him and said, 'What are you doing? Let her go. She wants to be with me; she wants to go and find Misty.' But he wouldn't let her go, and Kirstin bit him on the arm. And when she bit him, he jumped and let her go. And we ran looking for Misty."

George Walls found their pet's body, still warm, in the back of the Land-Rover.

"I managed to give her a kiss and a stroke and say goodbye, and Kirstin arrived and she did the same," Mrs. Walls recalled.

McBride demanded to know under what law Misty had been killed, since it was her understanding that it was illegal to kill healthy animals. When the police could not tell her, she ran back to the house ahead of her mother, grabbed a kitchen knife from a drawer and rushed into the road again.

"On the way back I met Kirstin," said Mrs. Walls. "She had a knife in her hand and said she might as well be dead seeing her wee goat was dead as well. The constable approached her to take the knife away, but George said to leave her alone and he would do it, which he did."

McBride began shouting at the police and hurling curses at the vet, calling him a "murderer" and saying he "should be saving animals, not killing them."

At that point she was arrested, handcuffed and driven with her mother to the jail in Dumfries where she was kept in a cell alone for four hours. She was charged with assaulting a police officer, brandishing a weapon and breach of the peace – charges that when combined spelled a prison sentence of over a year.

According to Mrs. Walls, during the drive to the police station Graham told the distraught McBride to "grow up. This is the real world, not Disney World." She also attempted to justify the actions of the vet, saying he was "a nice man" who had given up a whole half-hour of his time to talk with her mother.

"My goat gave her whole life," McBride snapped back.

Mrs. Walls explained to WorldNetDaily what had happened, that is, how a small goat carefully concealed in a shed could a short while later be found dead at the side of the road. Quite simply, it was by a ruse perpetrated by the police, the veterinarian and the man from SERAD, she said.

Although officials had given assurances that Misty was to be spared, behind the scenes that policy was quickly changed. On April 2, the vet – who hailed from Aberdeen but had traveled to Dumfries several weeks before to assist SERAD in its efforts – telephoned to say he was coming to dispose of Misty. Unable to answer the questions Mrs. Walls posed to him, such as why he should do this when Misty had had no contact with the animals on the neighboring farm, he had a local vet contact the Walls.

The second vet visited the family in person the following evening. He spent two and a half hours "bullying" the family into letting him kill Misty "humanely," said Mrs. Walls. When she demanded that blood tests be taken to determine if the goat were infected – which she knew was her right under the law – he refused, claiming they'd be "inconclusive."

The evening of the killing an "elderly man came to the house, introduced himself as a vet and said he was there to destroy our goat," Mrs. Walls said. She continued to disallow this without tests, which like the local vet he flatly refused to do – "No, we don't do tests," he said. Nor did he have the necessary "Form A," a paper stating the premises were "infected" and the animals subject to slaughter.

After half an hour of arguing, he left with threats that he was going to call the police to have her arrested. A few minutes later, Graham and Caldow knocked at the back door – an indication that they had been waiting outside to be called if necessary.

While the two officers distracted Mrs. Walls in the kitchen by talking with her, the SERAD official and the vet surreptitiously broke into the shed where Misty was hidden and quickly dispatched her.

Is that legal? Attorneys and legal scholars say no, and SERAD and its English counterpart, the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, were coming to realize they were on very shaky ground legally, hence the urgency for the Animal Health Bill, which is pending in Parliament, legislation that would remove the statutory restraints on the agencies' power.

Of immediate concern to McBride, however, was the possibility of a prison term stemming from her biting Caldow on the arm and disturbing the peace. The weapons-brandishing charge was dropped prior to her trial.

Her plight generated considerable publicity in the media, and she was hailed as a heroine by those opposing the government's cull policy, receiving enormous support over the past 11 months through the Internet from people as far away as the U.S. and Australia.

But though friends offered reassurances, McBride was concerned that the prosecution would demand jail time so that her case might serve as an example to others. After all, she reasoned, if the prosecution was prepared to be lenient, why hadn't the charges simply been dismissed?

"I always had this doubt in my mind, and I lived with that for months," she explained. "I worried about my job. Even if I were locked up for only a month or two, I could still lose my job. Then what would I do? There was this black cloud hanging over me."

'A victory for common sense'

The day of the trial, March 11, was sunny but bitter cold and windy, and it was with serious misgivings that McBride, with her parents and solicitor Alan Brazenall, a criminal attorney in Dumfries, arrived at the Sheriff Court for the 10 a.m. hearing.

They were completely unprepared for the crush of media from TV, radio and the press – plus the huge turnout of supporters, some of whom had traveled several hundred miles to be there.

Kirstin McBride with her mother and step-father outside the court. Photo by Astrid Goddard for Sovereignty, with permission.

"There were about 80 people there," Brazenall told WorldNetDaily. "I've never seen the likes of it. Kirstin had said to me, 'Will the public be there?' And I said there might be a few because so many people have been supporting her case. We got there – well, you've seen the pictures. There was this huge crowd of people. The court officers were going mad."

Juanita Wilson, whose successful battle to save her animal sanctuary near Dumfries last May brought an end to the contiguous cull policy in Scotland, had organized the demonstration and commissioned a huge banner that declared "11 million animals murdered; it is not Kirstin who should be on trial."

"Eleven million animals murdered, 80 percent of which were healthy," read another banner, while a third asked – in English and Gaelic – "Who breached Misty's peace?"

Carrying a sign reading "From Suffolk, for Misty," Dot Boag, an anti-cull activist who had traveled nearly 500 miles to Dumfries, presented McBride with a bouquet of flowers. Rather than attend the trial itself, Boag remained outside with fellow activist Jean Dixon to hand leaflets to passersby detailing the track record of the government's slaughter policy.

Sheriff Kenneth Ross, like Brazenall, was amazed by the crowd that filed into the courtroom and settled into every seat, remarking that in all his years on the bench he had never seen as much interest in the proceedings in the Sheriff Court in Dumfries.

Because they were to be witnesses, the Walls could not remain with their daughter during the trial, which lasted until late afternoon. Other witnesses were the police officers and the veterinarian. The SERAD official was not called to testify, though he was present in the court.

McBride examines supporters' banner outside court. Photo by Astrid Goddard for Sovereignty, with permission.

The defense was based in part on what in the United States is called a lack of due process, and not on whether or not the cull in itself was unlawful. Arguing the illegality of the cull had been tried in courts throughout the country, "without much success," Brazenall explained.

"The main proposition of our defense was that what they (the police and the vet) had done was unlawful and therefore what happened (what McBride did) could be justified," he said. "We did not argue that the cull was unlawful or bad, but that in carrying out the cull the law was not followed."

Brazenall said that the law on serving bonds was "completely ignored," no forms had been served on McBride or her mother or step-father, and that the law as it stands does not allow a vet or ministry official to break into a building or force entry.

In his testimony, the vet complained about the defendant's remarks to him, but the audience remained on her side.

"He said that I had told him that he was a disgrace to his profession, and everybody in the court cheered and were going, 'hear, hear.' It felt really good," McBride told WorldNetDaily.

Among the media covering the trial was Astrid Goddard, who has been covering foot-and-mouth events for Sovereignty, "a journal for national independence" and an online webzine, published by Alastaire McConnachie of Glasgow. In a detailed account of the proceedings Goddard reports some startling admissions by the vet. In her words:

"[The vet], questioned by Mr. Brazenall, made it very clear that a Form A notice had never been issued to Kirstin and her parents, and there was no justification for assuming that the cottage formed part of the farm which had received a Form A notice and which had been culled out two weeks previously. He had not been able to form any diagnosis in the dark, and there had been no blood test taken.

"[The vet] said: 'I have seen farmers who had not shed a tear in 60 years, who could not speak for the tears coming down their face for the loss of their animals. I didn't see any grief or tears from Miss McBride, just rage.'"

Comments Goddard: "Well, for some of us, righteous indignation is understandable. Perhaps if [he] and the other vets who so facilitated the slaughter policy had encountered a little more 'rage' while they went about their death-dealing business, instead of just pitiful tears, then they might have had more cause to question the rightness of what they were doing."

After hearing the testimony from witnesses and McBride herself, Ross found the defendant guilty of assault and breach of the peace for "shouting and swearing," Goddard reports. However, he described the case as "wholly exceptional" and granted her an absolute discharge, which means her record remains unblemished.

Ross prefaced his ruling by stating it seemed to him "that actions here may not have been legal, and proper procedures and terms of the Animal Health Act were not followed."

He said, "It is imperative any actions of public officials that destroy property and invade privacy must be legally carried out. Enthusiasm in an emergency cannot be an excuse."

The audience applauded the verdict. Goddard and others termed it "a victory for common sense."

"I can't tell you how relieved I am," said McBride. "That huge black cloud that's been hanging over me – it's just vanished. But I'm more determined now than ever to go ahead and find a way of making them pay for what they did and get some justice."

McBride and her parents are thinking about pursuing the matter in civil court but are hampered by lack of funds. She has saved some money from her job at ScotRail, "but I've not got a great lot," she said, and added, "We don't want to get ourselves a lot of debts, because we're not that kind of family. We've never been in debt before. But we're trying to find a way of not letting them get away with murder. We're trying to find a way of doing something about it, but sensibly."

Several funds have been set up throughout Britain by various parties to help victims facing legal fees and costs or who have an interest in taking legal actions. McBride and her mother may be contacted by e-mail at [email protected].

As is the case with many others treated in similar fashion by government officials and their agents during the foot-and-mouth crisis, the experience was a wakeup call for McBride. While previously she had paid no attention whatsoever to politics, she now has become very active.

"I must admit I wasn't interested and I found politics boring and thought it has nothing to do with me," she said. "I have just realized to what extent every little political decision actually does affect you. I didn't believe before to what extent it actually affects everyday life, and we've become quite political. We've been quite active – we've been to London and Edinburgh and all over the country protesting. I'd never done anything like that before."

Mrs. Walls concurred: "It's supposed to be a democracy, but one begins to wonder. You know, I've never been interested in politics until this happened to us and it has really opened my eyes. It really has made me sit up and think."