Badger Parade Postponed

Obscure 20 year old British comedy references aside, Governments, unfortunately, have a nasty habit of picking and choosing scientific data to fit their ideology. The latest example from our current Government concerns badgers once again. Badgers are a natural reservoir of a type of tuberculosis that also happens to infect cows. Farmers don't like having their cows infected with TB and so are generally in favour of eradicating badgers anywhere near their farms. Most farmers and other rural types tend to vote Conservative and so it is that the humble badger finds itself pitched against the might of Her Majesty's Government.

Over the past two years there has been a pilot study in two areas to see if culling badgers will reduce the incidence of TB in cattle. The pilots were based on an earlier study, The Krebs Study, that found that to achieve a 12-16% decrease in bovine TB incidence you had to kill at least 70% of the badger population every 4 years. Yes, you read that correctly. 70% of badgers have to die to achieve a very modest decrease in the numbers of cows getting TB. The Krebs Study also showed that if you failed to kill as many as that then there was a good chance that you could actually increase the spread of the TB because the badgers become a lot more mobile once they realise the apocalypse has arrived. Who could blame them?

The pilot was conducted in two English counties, Gloucestershire and Somerset, where it was necessary to kill at least 615 & 316 respectively. By the end of the allowed 6 week period of the cull (the time frame is kept short so that the blow can be dealt swiftly to the badger population before they have a chance to move elsewhere) 341 badgers had been killed in Somerset and only 274 in Gloucestershire. On top of this, an independent expert panel found that the method used to kill the badgers (trapping them and then shooting them) was inhumane; an unacceptably high percentage of them were found to suffer and for longer than was permitted.

It is difficult to see how this pilot scheme could be used to justify rolling out the culling program more widely. It's quite possible that the cull could have made the situation worse and hundreds of badgers will have suffered and died for no purpose. The pilot was broadly based on research carried out over 8 years by Professor Rosie Woodroffe. She has publicly stated that the Government's position is not backed up by the evidence. She says, 'This announcement plums new depths. In [cherry picking the data], it does a disservice to the farmers it seeks to protect, by feeding their hope of a solution to the TB problem with an approach which actually risks making the problem worse.' Indeed.

Apparently building a decent fence would be too much effort to go to. Image used with permission