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Here’s a photograph to stop you in your tracks. It’s a cow, wearing a nappy. At first glance, it could be an elaborate April Fool’s spoof or a sketch from a comedy show.

But no. Johann Huber, a Bavarian cattle farmer, has started putting nappies on his herd to avoid falling, er, foul of an EU fertiliser directive.

It might seem like an absurd protest against another ridiculous piece of Brussels bureaucratic interference, but Herr Huber insists he has no choice.

Barmy Bavaria: A new EU ruling means that farmers con no longer fertilise slopes of more than 15 degrees, including with cow pats – meaning the farmers of the Alps have taken to putting their herds in nappies

The Bavarian dairy industry is convinced that there is no other way to comply with the latest environmental laws. New EU legislation forbids ‘land application of fertilisers to steeply sloping ground to avoid leaching of nitrates and water pollution’.

As the ban on ‘fertilisers’ also includes cow-pats, farmers feel they have no alternative but to prevent what cows do naturally from coming into contact with the soil.

The directive applies to all land with a gradient of more than 15 per cent. And sloping ground doesn’t come much steeper than the Alpine pastures where Herr Huber’s family have been grazing their cattle for more than 400 years.

The cow in the picture is called Doris, the first of Herr Huber’s 18 animals who will be fitted with home-made nappies.

‘There are no commercially available nappies for cows yet,’ he explained. Unless this rule is overturned, there soon will be.

Just wait until news of this initiative reaches the bovine section of the Ministry of Ag and Fish. How long before they’ll be insisting on British cattle wearing nappies, too?

Herds of heifers will find their nether regions wrapped tightly in terry towelling. Some enterprising inventor will make a killing selling giant Pampers to stop Aberdeen Angus polluting Scottish streams.

In no time, there’ll be another debate on the rival merits of ‘real’ nappies versus disposables. Which causes more damage to the environment?

You may laugh, but we’ve already been down this road with babies. In the Nineties, councils employed legions of ‘real nappy’ co-ordinators to persuade mothers to stop using throwaway, commercially produced nappies.

This barmy scheme only went into reverse when someone worked out that the detergent used to wash ‘real’ nappies did more damage to the planet than the stuff used in disposables.

Cattle present a whole new scale of problem. Will farmers have to install giant vats of sterilising solution to soak the nappies? And mile-long washing lines to dry them naturally?

Who is going to volunteer to change these dirty nappies? What’s the worst job you’ve ever had? And how are farmers supposed to dispose of the waste matter, now that it’s classed as a toxic hazard on a par with spent nuclear fuel rods?

This is, of course, the kind of complete madness we have come to expect when Euro bureaucracy meets eco-fanaticism. All sense of proportion goes straight out of the barn door.

Pound for pound, cows are the most cost-effective creatures on Earth. They bless us with everything from baby milk to Manolo Blahnik shoes.

Imagine a world without cattle. No steaks, burgers, cheese, Chesterfield sofas, leather jackets, the list is endless.

And they’re the greenest animals, too, eating crops which can not only easily be regrown but recycled into the bargain. Manure from cattle has been used as fertiliser from time immemorial. From nose to tail, cattle are the very definition of sustainability.

Johann Huber (pictured) has been forced to make his own nappies out of sheets, because there are no commercially available ones yet… but there will be soon

Where is the evidence that cows are polluting water sources?

They’ve been doing what they do in streams, fields and rivers longer than bears have been doing it in the woods.

This isn’t the first time the environazis have put cows in the firing line. For the past few years, they’ve been trying to find ways to counter the amount of flatulence produced by cattle, which is said to be puncturing the ozone layer.

According to a report from the Danish climate change minister, a cow emits more greenhouse gases than a family car and is a major contributor to global warming.

Hang on a minute. Cows have been around for 10,000 years. In that time we’ve been through ice ages, droughts, floods, heatwaves. Why are the cows now getting the blame for killing the polar bears?

And even if they are, what have the polar bears ever done for us?

Scientists have been experimenting with more eco-friendly diets for cattle. But cows eat grass. What could be more eco-friendly than that?

OK, so they might pump out more noxious fumes than a lager lout after a night spent trawling the balti houses of Birmingham.

But instead of forcing cows to wear nappies, why not harness the force of their emissions and graze them in fields next to the forests of useless windmills littering the countrysides of Europe.

Most of these turbines are idle half the time because there’s not enough wind. Put them downwind of a herd of Herefords and every time the cows break wind there might be enough puff to power a hairdryer for a couple of minutes.

Nappies for cattle sounds like a Ukip scare story. No doubt it will be dismissed by the EU as another ‘myth’. But the farmers of Bavaria aren’t laughing.

The idea that cow-pats are killing the planet is a load of old bull.

One of the few qualifications I’ve got is a Cycling Proficiency Test, gained when I was still at junior school, aged 11.

From what I remember, this involved a brief quiz on the Highway Code and a couple of laps round the school playground to demonstrate hand signals and braking skill.

In those days, the police could regularly be seen patrolling on pushbikes. Back then, every village had its own bobby.

Today, all the police houses have been sold off, neighbourhood police stations closed down and proper coppers replaced by community support officers. 

Parish councillors in Osbaldwick, North Yorkshire, complained this week that their local PCSO, Jamie Gibson, has to spend six hours of his eight-hour shift walking between the villages on his rural beat.

That’s because he hasn’t passed his cycling proficiency and is not allowed to ride a bike.

A police spokesman also blamed the public because they keep stopping Mr Gibson for a chat. I’m surprised they haven’t been charged with obstruction, or wasting police time.

The spokesman said that to claim Mr Gibson had not passed his cycling proficiency was ‘trivialising’ the test. He simply hasn’t been trained to Level Three of national standards, which involves negotiating roundabouts and ‘using bikes if you have to rush to a job and go down steps’.

How difficult is that? We’re not talking The Italian Job here.

It turns out that the training scheme used by the police was originally designed for children aged between eight and 12. In other words, the Cycling Proficiency Test.

Mind how you go.

Who studies surgery in Khartoum?

One of the four ‘British’ terror suspects arrested in London this week is Tarik Hassane, known as ‘The Surgeon’.

Hassane, of Moroccan and Saudi heritage, was studying in Sudan.

Educated at Westminster City School, he was expected to become a doctor but failed to achieve the A-level grades necessary to secure a place at King’s College medical school in London. 

Instead of re-taking his exams and re-applying to King’s or to another British college, he decided to pursue his studies in Sudan. As you do.

The last time anyone looked, Khartoum was not renowned as a centre of medical learning excellence, on a par with, say, Oxbridge or Harvard, in the U.S. 

But, apparently, Hassane had been assured that the General Medical Council does accept Sudanese medical degrees and he would have been allowed to practise on his return to Britain.

Meanwhile, according to a report this week, thousands of young, British-trained doctors are emigrating in pursuit of a better life.

I’d be surprised if many of them were heading for Sudan.

Call Me Dave claims to have secured agreement from our European ‘partners’ that citizens of any new nation which joins the EU will not get automatic freedom to move to Britain.

How’s that going to work, then? We haven’t been able to stop hundreds of thousands of non-EU citizens ending up here, thanks to the duplicity of the French and the Italians.

Sometimes it seems that only those who want to come here legitimately are refused entry.

For instance, a children’s choir of Ugandan orphans invited to sing at a fund-raising charity festival in Norwich has been turned down for visas.

The reason given by the Home Office was that they didn’t have letters of consent from their parents.

Eh? They don’t have any parents. The clue is in the word ‘orphans’.

In Tuesday’s column I referred to HMS Sir Galahad, which now serves as a sunken war grave off the Falklands. 

A number of readers have written to point out that it was part of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, crewed by merchant seamen, not the Royal Navy. I’m happy to put the record straight.

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