Nothing could have been farther from the pastoral image of a British beef cow chewing the cud in a country field.

Television footage of head-swaying beasts, driven shakily mad by a wasting disease, became a common sight during the late 1980s.

It soon became clear that bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as “mad cow disease”, had been spread through cattle feed.

By the mid 1990s the disease had created the biggest food scare Britain had seen. It resulted in the culling of millions of cattle and the devastation of the country’s beef industry.

Until then, the public had taken little interest in modern industrial cattle farming. But when BSE was identified as the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), a human brain-wasting condition, the truth became horribly clear.

Commercial feeds for most farm animals contained meat and bone meal. Cows, which are natural herbivores, were being fed parts of other dead cows. Their feed also included the ground and cooked left-overs of the slaughtering process gleaned from other animals. The carcasses of sick and injured animals such as pigs and chickens were being used as a protein supplement.

The use of dead, diseased cows was identified by experts as the probable cause of the spread of BSE. As a result, the British and European authorities introduced laws and regulations to control the use of animal remains in feed.

In 1988 Britain introduced a ruminant-to-ruminant feed ban and made BSE a notifiable disease. Six years later, the EU banned the feeding of mammalian meat and bone meal to cows and sheep.

In 1996, when BSE was linked to a new vCJD, the Government extended the ban on the feeding of mammalian meat and bone meal to all farmed animals.

In 2000, the EU authorised a ban on the use of all animal proteins in animal feed in all member states. Now the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), an advisory body to the EU, is hoping to reverse this ban with the introduction of new regulations. In the minutes of a meeting published last December, the committee concluded that pig meat could be fed to chickens, and chicken meat to pigs.

“The EESC suggests that the European Commission pursue and step up as swiftly as possible the studies currently under way which clearly show that the use of meat meal from nonruminants can be used in pig and poultry feed without posing any danger to human health,” it said.

“The way in which proteins are identified and the methods used to trace the meat meal in which they are found must give consumers a cast-iron guarantee that pigs are fed on meat meal obtained exclusively from the byproducts of poultry, and that poultry is fed on meat meal obtained exclusively from the by-products of pigs.”

The reason for the proposed change, according to the minutes, was increased costs to Europe’s farmers and consumers. The committee said: “The ban on the use of meat meal dealt the sector a major blow, because it lost a major source of protein for feed and the price of vegetable protein shot up due to increased demand. Consequently, the price of feed rose sharply. Slaughterhouse by-products also went from being a source of additional profit to constituting a financial burden; this factor, combined with the higher price of meat meal, inevitably led to higher prices for the consumer.”

Supporters of the committee’s conclusions point out that pigs and chickens are omnivores and that, if the feeding process is closely monitored, feeding chickens to pigs and pigs to chickens should be safe.

Seppo Kallio, a committee member from Finland, said that the conclusions had been approved despite some reservations on health grounds.

“We have given our opinion to the European Union that this is of the utmost importance,” he said. “Our committee has members who are employers, trade unions and consumers, and we were very much in support of these proposals.”

Although Mr Kallio, who represents farmers, supports the proposals, he added that he had his own reservations about any future relaxation of EU laws. “This kind of exercise is a big risk because we would have to monitor production very closely,” he said.

As a result of the committee’s conclusions, €1.7 million (£1.15 million) of European money has been authorised for scientific research into the detection of meat products in animal feed. The research is being coordinated by a Belgium-based research programme that hopes to devise ways of identifying different types of meat in animal feed.

According to the group’s proposal, it “aims to complete the scientific conditions that should allow the repealing of the extended feed ban”.

Twelve scientific institutes across Europe, including the Central Science Laboratory and the Veterinary Laboratories Agency in Britain, are involved in the research.

Vincent Baeten, from the Walloon Agricultural Research Agency, said that they hoped to establish tests that would identify cow, pig, sheep, fish and poultry meat in animal feed. “The EU has got to the stage that amendments of certain BSE measures can be done, but only if the scientific conditions are in place,” he said.

"We are trying to develop tests which allow the identification of meat which can later be used to ensure that certain animals are being fed the right kind of feed, preventing any risks of species cannibalism.”

A spokesman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said last night that the Government was aware of the EU proposals and was monitoring the scientific research commissioned by the EU. “There are currently no specific EU proposals relating to pig meat or poultry meat on the table,” he said.

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