Following the recent news from the Court of Appeal on the WAG badger cull (see previous blog) my attention has turned to the the rest of the UK. The Conservative party had said that it intended to put a badger cull back on the table in their manifesto.
Nick Herbert in a speech entitled “The New Age of Agriculture” had this to say earlier this year;
“It is necessary for instance to take action on Bovine TB. Yes, with a badger cull if necessary, because we cannot funk that decision.”
Although at the end of May Jim Paice, the Minister for Agriculture, stated;
“Rest assured, if [the Badger Trust] were to win a judicial review, culling badgers would be off the table for the foreseeable future.” – Devon Post, Badger cull in less than a year as Government pledges to tackle TB
There is no debating the impact that bovine tuberculosis (bTB) is having on farming, in part due to the EU legislation that does not allow vaccination of cattle, despite the fact that a test does now exist that can differentiate between vaccinated cattle and cattle that have been exposed to bTB;
“Dr Jayne Hope and colleagues at the Institute for Animal Health’s Compton Laboratory have developed a test that can distinguish cattle that have been vaccinated against bovine tuberculosis (TB) from those that had been infected by the causative agent, the bacterium Mycobacterium bovis.” – Institute for Animal Health
A lot has been said about badgers being a cause of the spread of bTB, but no-one seems to have studied this mechanism directly. Indeed there is no actual proof, only speculation that where badgers exist and no other reason can be found for a herd breakdown, that they must be the culprit. There are not only numerous other potential carriers in the wildlife population (deer and fox to name a couple), but what about biosecurity? How well are farm workers ensuring that they are not passing the disease from farm to farm, at market, is it being passed on machinery and vehicles?
I haven’t found enough information on that to satisfy me that there is real proof that badgers are a high level cause of herd breakdowns.
DEFRA have this to say;
“There is still some uncertainty surrounding bTB and the way it is transmitted. Bovine TB is spread primarily through the exchange of respiratory secretions between infected and uninfected animals. This transmission usually happens when animals are in close contact with each other…. [ie in cattle sheds over winter? – ed.]
Bovine TB is a chronic disease and it can take years to develop. M. bovis grows very slowly and only replicates every 12-20 hours. The lymph nodes in the animal’s head usually show infection first and as the disease progresses lesions will begin to develop on the surface of the lungs and chest cavity. [see below statement on testing – ed.]
Due to the slow progression of infection, the clinical signs of bTB, such as weakness, coughing and loss of weight, are now rarely seen in cattle in GB. The Government’s compulsory testing and slaughter programme ensures that most cattle herds are tested for bTB at least every four years. This identifies most infected cattle before the disease is apparent.” – DEFRA, Bovine TB: What is bovine TB?
Recent studies have identified wild deer in particular as having potential to pass TB onto cattle;
“in the light of the results presented here, the paucity of data on interactions between deer and cattle and their rapidly expanding numbers and distribution in southern England, it seems prudent to consider deer as a potential, although probably localised, source of infection for cattle.” – CSL 2004
The debate, in spite of numerous gaps in information, has centred nonetheless around ‘to cull or not to cull’. Two excellent articles by Dr. Chris Cheeseman and the late (great) Warren Cresswell outline the ISG recommendations and findings against culling extremely well on the Black and White Campaign website.
What is important to highlight is the following:
“In Britain as a whole, over 80% of cattle are never tested; 11%-23% of cattle in multiple reactor herds (three or more tuberculin skin test reactors) are infected but evade diagnosis by the skin test (the majority of these animals remain undiagnosed at follow-up testing by which time other animals also show-up positive); multiple reactor herds constitute 40% of breakdowns herds in the South West region (Bourne et al, 2007). There is also overwhelming evidence for disease spread into new areas by the movement of infected cattle (Bourne et al, 2007), adding, in several parts of the country, to the tragedy of the previous FAM outbreak. The ISG clearly believed this highlights the fundamental importance of cattle to cattle transmission and therefore the priority should be to gain better control of the disease in cattle. Their report concluded that ‘substantial reductions in cattle TB incidence could be achieved by improving cattle-based control measures’.” – Warren Cresswell, Black and White Campaign, Bovine TB and Badgers
So what should we be doing?
“There does need to be a far more aggressive focus on the cattle problem before one is going to see any decrease in the instance of the disease” – Professor John Bourne, Chairman of ISG (Final Report, June 2007)
What are these controls? It has been suggested that testing should be carried out on all herds in hotspot areas (as has been done recently in Wales). This could identify and therefore remove a far larger number of infected cattle and herds. Since tighter controls were brought in in Wales, a reduction has already occurred;
“calculations show that in the cull county of Dyfed new herd incidents fell from one in 20 tested in 2008 to one in 30 last year. One individual animal out of 104 tested was slaughtered in 2008 against one out of 141 tested last year.
Defra’s figures for 2008 and 2009 show confirmed new incidents of bovine tuberculosis in Dyfed had declined by 50 from 280 (18 percent) up to December 31 last. (Detailed figures for the proposed cull area of Pembrokeshire are not available).
Defra also reveals that the number of new herd incidents in Dyfed fell by 67 from 659 (10 percent) over the same period. This was in spite of 1,194 more herds being tested than the 5,788 in 2008: a rise of 20.6 percent.” – Badger Trust, from DEFRA figures
Some farmers however, are not happy about increased restrictions;
“The farming industry responded with a mixture of defiance and anger.
Farming organisations refused to accept that the report signalled the end of the road for a badger cull and pledged to continue working with Defra to formulate a workable policy.
Farmers For Action leader David Handley issued a call to farmers to refuse to comply with TB testing rules, while Paul Griffith, Devon NFU county chairman, warned of ‘massive’ illegal badger culling if the Government accepted the recommendations.” – Farmers Guardian, Tighter cattle controls, but no badger cull – ISG report
Note the comment at the bottom of the previous article.
DEFRA have produced literature aimed at preventing badgers coming into contact with stock, and feed, and other bio-security measures. What I cannot understand, is why it is that some farmers seem to refuse point blank to make improvements that will reduce the spread of this disease, a disease that they consistently, loudly and aggressively claim (rightly) is costing taxpayers huge sums of money (in compensation for lost cattle). Not only that, causing untold stress and heartache to the farming community. Why do they insist that a cull of badgers is the only way that we will stop this disease, yet will not implement the other strategies recommended by the ISG?
There are a lot of farmers, on the other hand, that understand the science and the ecology, and do not believe that a cull can help. Some of whom signed the Pembrokeshire Against the Cull petition delivered to WAG shortly before the Review hearing. A much higher percentage of landowners than has been admitted by WAG disagreed with a cull, they understood that removing badgers from an area, will only allow new badgers to repopulate it at a later date. Badgers with, likely, the same incidence of TB in their population.
Vaccination of the badger population will, over a relatively short period of time (due to the short expected lifespan) allow badgers infected with tb to die out, and healthy badgers to replace them, without any movement in badger population. This means no spread of tb on the outskirts of the area, and no influx of badgers with the disease at a later date. The oral vaccine would improve this even further, reducing disturbance and stress to individual animals.
See the following article in the Farmers Guardian for more info:
Evaluating badger-proofing with biosecurity trial
For a cull to happen in England now, the judgement handed down in Wales needs to be considered. The legality of that cull was rejected on all three grounds. Not on the science, this wasn’t even considered. But on the legality of a cull of a protected species. Gwendolin Morgan, the Badger Trust Solicitor explains it best;
“The court ruled that not only had the order permitting the cull been drawn too widely, but that the Welsh ministers had also acted unlawfully in misinterpreting section 21 of the Animal Health Act 1981 as giving them power to cull if they could achieve a reduction in TB which was “merely more than trivial or insignificant”. They also unlawfully failed to carry out a balancing exercise to weigh up the harm involved (ie killing over 2,000 badgers) against the potential benefit – which the minister’s own model predicted to be a reduction in the rate of cattle herd breakdowns of just 0.3% of farms annually.
This means that a minister contemplating any future cull will have to overcome a series of hurdles thrown up by the judgement.” – Gwedonlin Morgan, Solicitor, Badger Trust, The Guardian (Letters Page)
And I will let her finish off this blog with;
“The good news is that an alternative method has become available – an injectable vaccine. In the same area designated for the pilot cull, the minister could now use the same logistics over the same period to trap and inject the badgers, so producing a healthy badger population. This progressive action could solve a real problem and unite the community in the process.” – Gwendolin Morgan – The Guardian (Letters Page)
Culling badgers is not only potentially extraordinarily divisive, it is not sound science, and could indeed make things worse. We need to move forward to a strategy that is both effective and collaborative, not backwards.