“We are in mourning, we are grieving” — those were the first words Anastasis Zannettos spoke when Phileleftheros reached him by phone on Thursday afternoon, asking about the situation facing livestock farmers in Larnaca district, where some are watching their animals being culled following foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks and others are living in fear that their own unit will test positive.
Zannettos, 36, from Aradippou, works in a family livestock unit with sheep, goats and cattle that has so far tested negative. In recent days he and a group of fellow farmers have taken on a coordinating role, using media and social media to keep colleagues informed of briefing gatherings being held across the district.
He has worked on the unit since he was two years old, he told us. He asked if he could send something in writing, and shortly afterwards a message arrived — a letter addressed to Cypriot society that lays bare the anguish, pain and anger of farmers across the island.
His words, in full:
“These are not livestock units, they are not pens — they are our lives. Larnaca no longer smells of spring. It smells of death and injustice.
We speak to you — the ordinary citizen, the father, the mother, the person who knows what it means to toil for your daily bread. We are the livestock farmers of your land. The people who wake in the dark, every day, every holiday, every Sunday, to go to the pen and milk, so that milk reaches the glass of your children.
Today, they are forcing us — the proud labourers of this land — to weep. They tell us we must slaughter thousands of animals. Not because they are dying, but for ‘the numbers’, for ‘the export paperwork’, for money. You have seen in various videos the barbarity carried out by human hands.
And us? We who watch them alive — the animals we raised, whose mothers we know, whom we looked at as newborns with quiet pride because they resembled their mothers — we watch them run to save themselves, as if they know what awaits them when the Veterinary Services walk into the pen.
We watch the mothers searching for their young in a pen strewn with carcasses, because the babies die first. This is not a health protocol. It is the barbaric killing of innocent souls. It is an affront to nature and to God.
We ask you to add your voice to ours. We are not asking for charity. We are asking for HUMANITY.
Stop the slaughter of the innocent. Stop the torment of the animals that have fed us for generations.
If today we allow this crime in our pen, tomorrow another crime, in another form, will knock on your door. Stand with what is right, with what is moral. Not with the agenda of killings.”