The Badger Trust has formally stated its total opposition to culling badgers to control cattle tuberculosis and calls on two UK Governments to reconsider their proposed policies.
The Coalition Government and the Welsh Assembly Government are to give their decisions in respect of England or Wales respectively during the early part of the New Year following public consultations.
The considered response of the Badger Trust to both consultations is that badger culling is unjustified in the light of available scientific evidence. The proposals of either Government will not in practice deliver the estimated benefits and considerably increase the risk of spreading bovine tuberculosis (bTB) from one farm to another. The only effective natural barriers to the movement of badgers are the sea or large estuaries. In Wales landowners and farmers could be criminalized for refusing to allow contractors onto their land to kill badgers, a disproportionate interference with their human rights.
Policies set out in the consultation papers have underestimated the risks of making outbreaks worse and overestimated the benefits of culling.
The Badger Trust urges a policy based on the licensed vaccine now available for badgers. It also presses for urgent negotiations with the European Union to allow vaccination of cattle alongside the DIVA test to discriminate between healthy, vaccinated cattle and infected cattle.
The Governments’ proposals as outlined in both consultation documents contain many erroneous assumptions, which the Trust addresses in detail in its formal response documents available at http://www.badgertrust.org.uk/.
The proposal to license farmers to shoot free-running badgers is impractical and ill-founded. The Coalition Government has not shown how culling would be sustained over at least 70 percent of the areas. Other challenges would be to kill at least 70 percent of badgers across very large areas – the size of a large city – containing from 150 to 320 farms simultaneously for at best a marginal effect. The Intensive Action Area in Wales is much bigger still. No one has direct experience of shooting elusive badgers at dusk or in the dark over such large areas at the same time.
The new economic climate could preclude the effective and necessarily expensive official control of licensed shooting. The £50 million Randomised Badger Culling Trial of 1998-2007 (RBCT)* used cage trapping and shooting by trained and closely supervised staff, yet its results are misguidedly assumed to be achievable in the hands of less supervised contractors appointed by farmers or the Welsh Assembly Government.
It is inherently dangerous to residents and non-target animals, and more likely to wound badgers inhumanely rather than kill them. In addition, the sound of shots would prompt surviving badgers to stay below ground for hours if not days.
Defra in England and the Welsh Assembly Government are both ignoring a fundamental scientific principle in not providing for verifiable comparison of the results of killing against those of vaccination.
The Trust supports the use of the currently available injectable vaccine and the oral vaccine if licensed. Meanwhile the Trust demands UK-wide improvements in the detection of bTB in cattle, rigorous enforcement of pre- and post-movement testing and improved on-farm disease prevention.
The measures the two governments propose can make no meaningful contribution to the control of bovine tuberculosis and could make matters worse, in the words of the official scientific group overseeing the RBCT.
*Defra consultation document, para 68: “Badger culling has been part of bovine TB control in the past, through a variety of policies (see Annex A). However, it is not possible to compare the effectiveness of most of these different policies or compare any of them with the impact of not culling badgers at all, because they were not scientific trials. The RBCT is the only one of these that was conducted as a rigorous scientific trial”.
Annex B, para 3: “The results of this robust experimental trial are fully published and peer-reviewed and represent the most substantial and coherent evidence base for the evaluation of badger culling”. (http://www.defra.gov.uk/corporate/consult/tb-control-measures/index.htm)