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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
National
Tim Hanlon

Geronimo the alpaca 'didn't have TB and was wrongly put down by Government'

Geronimo the alpaca, who was controversially put down by Government vets, did not have tuberculosis and was wrongly euthanised, it is reported.

Helen Macdonald, 50, who owned Geronimo, fought a high profile campaign to avoid the alpaca being killed, claiming she was confident he was not infected.

But she lost a long legal battle to save Geronimo and the animal was taken away by officials, protected by police, from Miss Macdonald’s Gloucestershire farm last August.

It is said that she is now considering taking legal action against the Government.

Geronimo the alpaca did not have tuberculosis after all, it has been reported (Tom Wren / SWNS)

Post-mortem results have found that the alpaca was found to have no trace of bovine tuberculosis after all, the Daily Mail reported.

Initial tests on the animal for bovine tuberculosis in September were inconclusive with no lesions found on the lungs or respiratory tract - the most common place for them to be with the disease.

But the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said that tuberculosis-like lesions were found on liver and lymph nodes.

Further tests to discover whether Geronimo had the disease involving the examination of tissue samples for developing bacteriological cultures, have revealed that the animal did not have tuberculosis.

The High Court finally decided to go ahead with Geronimo being killed (Tom Wren / SWNS)

Geronimo, from New Zealand, was a pedigree alpaca worth £15,000 who had won competition thanks to the quality of his black wool.

The eight-year-old twice tested positive for tuberculosis in 2017 but Miss Macdonald disputed the results and a long legal battle went to the High Court where the decision was to kill the alpaca.

She claimed Geronimo had given false positives.

Thirteen expert vets had called on Environment Secretary George Eustice to stop the killing so that further tests could have been made that could also serve as to give a better understanding of bovine tuberculosis.

Defra previously said that while it had sympathy for the case it had to tackle tuberculosis and pushed ahead with the alpaca being put down.

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