PARIS, March 13— Western European countries have chosen to deal with foot-and-mouth disease largely by slaughter and cremation during rare outbreaks rather than by inoculating animals against it, as have many other countries, including some in Eastern Europe.

Most of the time, Western Europe, like the United States, remains disease free by monitoring imports of animals and meat products. None are allowed from countries that cannot be certified as disease free. The disadvantage of inoculations is that standard antibody tests cannot distinguish between the antibodies created in a diseased animal and antibodies created in an inoculated one. Newer tests can, but they have not been widely distributed.

Under the authorized approach for an outbreak in Western Europe in the last decade, all infected animals and others that might have come in contact with them must be killed and their carcasses burned, veterinary officials say. In a Europe-wide outbreak, the slaughter would run into hundreds of thousands of animals. Already more than 200,000 have been killed in Britain and France.

The alternative is that Europe's herds of cattle, sheep and pigs -- tens of millions of animals -- would become useless commercially. The disease kills young animals and causes adult ones to lose their appetites, drop weight, give less milk and abort spontaneously. It is considered unlikely that consumers would buy the meat, even if it is declared safe.

Some British scientists have argued that killing huge numbers of animals is senseless because between 80 and 95 percent will survive the disease. Some argue for returning to the pre-1991 practice in some places in Europe of inoculating herds around quarantined ones.

Asked about this, Jean Glavany, France's agriculture minister, said recently that French farming was ''so fragile that we cannot take the risk of exposing it to an extra epidemic.'' The measures taken, he said, ''may seem draconian, but they follow the principle of prevention.'' Vaccinations, he said, ''are a last step we sadly haven't excluded, but we're not there yet.''