ARABELLA WEST'S tongue-in-cheek (she can't be serious) description of Damien Hirst's Mother and Child misses completely what Hirst is trying to tell us.

He is, I believe, depicting the exploitation and cruelty of the meat and dairy industry and in this case it's the dairy.

However, it should have been called Mother and Children as the cow has a dissected foetus in her womb — not many people know this.

The irony of his choice of animal is that while most dairy cow calves are separated within a few days of birth from their mothers, a human mother and child will bond together in maternal harmony.

Also, thousands of bull calves are shot at birth or, soon after, a 'waste' product of the dairy industry, while tens of thousands, if not more, dairy cows are culled at between four to seven years because of disease (36 per cent), poor milk yield (28 per cent), and infertile or inability to calve (36 per cent) with the average lactations of three-and-a-half years — a life span of five to five-and-a-half years. (Animal Facts & Figures by Barry Kew).

So, if Arabella West thinks that this is the wonderful bounty of animal husbandry that makes our county a very special place, she must be still in that dimension of infinity of time and space — a sort of high-speed link into her bottomless soul she mentioned.

It is our insatiable appetite for meat and diary products that produces this situation, and if Damien Hirst had exhibited a dairy cow shackled by one leg and hanging in the killing room of an abattoir with its stomach split wide open and a foetus of its unborn calf in a pathetic heap beneath her we might just get the message of this piece of so-called 'modern art' — or would that be too much like reality for most people.

LEN SHORT, Press Officer, Animal Voices