8th February 2011
The Badger Trust says the Coalition Government and the Welsh Assembly Government must abandon any ideas of killing badgers because recent figures show steep falls in bovine tuberculosis (bTB) without any culling. The governments and the beef and dairy industries are now even less justified in their proposals, recently the subject of public consultations.
Both governments have introduced long-overdue controls on cattle movements and tightened up testing, but if the previous government had allowed badgers to be killed, the beef and dairy industries would be claiming culling as a reason for the decline.
Recent statistics for England have now shown a steady decline of 23.24 percent [1] for two consecutive years, from the high point of 38,973 cattle slaughtered to an (estimated) 33,000 in 2010 – without killing badgers or any other wildlife. This would be even faster than the decline in the 1960s. In Wales, the very area where the disease is at its worst shows an even steeper fall in the region where the cull is proposed. In Dyfed, 36 percent fewer cattle have been slaughtered at a saving for the taxpayer of about £6.5 million in compensation [2].
The currently successful cattle measures now in place are in line with those following World War II. Those reduced the slaughter of animals with bTB to a low point of 628 in 1979 and to about 1,000 a year throughout the 1970s and ‘80s. This remained consistent, despite eleven years in the middle when sporadic culling failed to have any overall effect.
Dave Williams, Chairman of the Badger Trust, said: “If Hilary Benn had allowed culling, the strident pro-culling voices would have been falsely rejoicing that ‘culling works’. Now, the beef and dairy industries’ obsession with the killing of badgers is increasingly perverse. There is absolutely no justification for it especially now with the present encouraging estimates. At the very least the killing programmes of the two governments would be premature as well as possibly counter-productive.
“Wiser heads in the governments should tell their agriculture Ministers and their supporters in the industries to leave the badgers alone. They should get on with maintaining the control measures that have clearly brought about such a sustained improvement in the fortunes of the sorely-afflicted farmers they claim to represent”.
[1] An extrapolation of Defra’s January to September 2010 provisional statistics.
[2] Defra County Animal Statistics (GB total).
