Date 31st March 2011
Attempts by the NFU’s southwest regional director Melanie Hall to justify badger culling have been comprehensively dismissed by the Badger Trust as ill-founded scaremongering.
Responding to an article written by Ms Hall in the Western Morning News on 24th March 2011, the Trust says, in a letter to the paper, that her claim that up to 75 per cent of TB outbreaks could be attributed to badgers is pure fiction “… part of the ill-founded scaremongering that drives the obsessional clamour for a badger cull”.
The Trust’s letter, by chairman David Williams, is a balanced statement of the scientific facts. It says: “The truth is that Government-funded research carried out over decades has yet to determine how badgers infect cattle, let alone what percentage of outbreaks can be attributed to badgers, themselves the victims, very often, of disease shed by cattle.
It continues:
“The article airily downgrades the significance of the (scientifically accepted) root cause of bTB spread—namely cattle-to-cattle infection—and overplays the take-up by farmers of essential on-farm biosecurity, attempting instead to grossly exaggerate the importance and prevalence of infected urine and saliva from badgers”.
The letter emphasises that even in TB hotspots most badgers are NOT infected and points out that the Government’s Independent Scientific Group found that in proactive areas fewer than one in eight of those infected with TB, had infected kidneys. It adds “… because the degree of infection varies, so does the number of bacteria shed, and of course sunlight, humidity and extremes of temperature all limit bacterial survival”.
The letter continues:
“In her attempts to point the finger of blame at badgers Melanie Hall chooses not to mention the key fact about bovine TB: it is a highly infectious respiratory disease, very similar to TB in humans, and it is most readily spread in the same way—by infected droplets breathed or coughed out”. It asks: “Could that disease transfer readily happen in a field during a chance meeting between badgers and cattle? Very improbable. Isn’t it much more likely to occur when cattle, with undetected disease carriers among them, are packed together for months on end during winter in faecally-contaminated often poorly ventilated sheds?”
The Trust’s letter continues:
“In the light of Melanie Hall’s comments, WMN readers need to be reminded that the ISG’s research, the most thorough scientific study ever carried out on badgers and their alleged role in bTB spread, concluded that culling badgers would have no meaningful impact and might well make matters worse. The research also concluded that bTB could be brought under control by cattle-measures alone (as happened in the post-war years) and it pinpointed numerous cattle-based measures which could help. Most have been ignored by an industry too keen to find a scapegoat”.
The Trust’s letter concluded with these comments:
“There is no quick fix to bovine TB, on that we are all agreed. The problem is essentially one of cattle management, which requires much more effective testing and a sustained and rigorous insistence on pre-movement testing. Culling badgers is not the answer. It is a clumsy, counterproductive, futile tool that can worsen disease spread and increase the prevalence of disease in those badgers that escape slaughter.
“Vaccination, while not yet the perfect tool, holds out the prospect of reduced levels of TB in badgers and, in parallel with a raft of tough, sustained, cattle-based measures, could contribute to disease control (note, for example, the huge reduction in Wales since they introduced Health Check Wales, for all the cattle). But the long term aim must be a successful cattle vaccine”.