Eradicating foot and mouth by culling improves both animal welfare and livestock yields, and would never have happened without government compensation and backed up by government sanctions. In a free market farmers would have had no incentive to sacrifice infected herds for the good of their neighbours. They would have had to put their faith in vaccination instead.

Although a slaughter policy is preferable to vaccination in the short term, it is timely to consider the remote harms. These go beyond the short-term damage to tourism. It has delayed the development of more effective vaccinations by destroying the vaccine market in developed countries. Some local species such as the Herdwick sheep may even be wiped out, which will alter the whole ecosystem of Cumbria. We may one-day come to regard culling as yet another of those seemingly good government ideas that eventually turned out to have caused more harm than good.