Here are some of mine.
Let’s start with vaccinating. I do quite a lot because I know it works and every time I consider dropping one out, say salmonella, I hear a horror story about someone’s flock being hit hard with it.
Before we cover my irritation, cut me some slack to have a rant about the anti-vaccination lobby even though I know some of you reading this will be part of it.
The 20th anniversary just passed last month of one of the worst examples of fraudulent science.
Andrew Wakefield, a former doctor, published a paper in the Lancet falsely linking the MMR vaccine with autism. His science was flawed and he had a number of undeclared conflicts of interest.
He was struck off the medical register and the Lancet and his co-authors retracted the paper but the damage was done and unvaccinated children and young adults have suffered from these diseases and many have died.
Mumps and measles outbreaks are now a regular occurrence in this country whereas two decades ago they were a rare occurrence.
Yet this dangerous fool travels the world with his film and the foolish and gullible flock to listen to him speak. The sage in the White House is a close disciple.
It has taken 20 years for vaccination rates to recover but there are a generation of parents who haven’t vaccinated their children for anything, relying on the herd immunity which is faltering and putting their own children and others at risk.
Enough Steve, get back on topic.
So, you take your vaccination pack out and the machine that should punch the holes out where the drawstring goes through can’t even properly do the one job. The only thing you have at hand is the needle so you use that to push the bits of half punched plastic out then find you have blocked your new needle with plastic.
Then you get your notebook pencil out and use that, successfully breaking the lead.
The machine, which has one job, to secure the rubber bung, doesn’t do that very well either. If you don’t stick the needle into the bung at least three times, the sharp thing that is meant to push through it instead pushes it into the vaccine.
So, then it is either a case of finding very long and skinny pliers if they even exist, though rural legend says they do, or cutting a hole in the top of a used vaccine pack and glugging half of the new vaccine into it as a full quantity spills out of the hole.
Now let’s talk about drench containers. They are big objects. Why are the labels and consequently the writing so small?
We are told the average age of sheep farmers is about my age of 58 so I imagine most of you have poor eyesight like me. Who can read that stuff?
Then there is the table of liveweights and what drench quantity to give each weight. Why does it stop at 50kg then demand you do some maths in your head to work out what quantity bigger animals might require? Are they trying to keep us stimulated on the job?
What about those drench gun plungers where the end is of a colour that can’t be discerned in the drench in the barrel. Do they think we have x ray eyes or do they just want us to have a guess?
Or maybe conspiracy theories like the anti-vaccination folk cling to might hold some answers.
Perhaps the vaccine and drench makers have a cunning plan to drive us mad over the course of a career.
