Brocks and Brooks

Twitter is buzzing today with suggestions that the English Government will announce its decision on badger culling tomorrow.  We’ll see – but I’d keep your ears open at around 1230 or so if I were you (unless you are a badger in which case I’d run down a hole, put your paws over your ears and go LaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLa).

Tomorrow’s announcement has to be judged on whether it contributes to a well thought-through programme to eradicate bTB in cattle (and badgers).

You might have thought, indeed many people do think, that the excuse provided by phone-hacking, resigning senior coppers all over the place, Murdochs coming to Parliament, Rebekah Brooks being arrested and the Prime Minister’s relationship with the former editor of the News of the World still being a live subject of speculation and unfavourable comment, would be reason enough for any government to plead that it had run out of road for reasons beyond its control.

However, the ‘news’ that vets say that an oral vaccine for badgers may not be feasible looks like a story designed to ease the path for a badger cull.  Or am I being too cynical? But who are these vets, exactly?

The Veterinary Laboratories Agency website does not admit to having made any pronouncement on this subject (neither on its bTB page nor on its news page). The Defra website does not have any pronouncement on this subject either as far as I can see.  It appears that this story in the Western Morning News is the source where unnamed scientists have disclosed that an oral vaccine may never be perfected.  Doesn’t seem very authoritative, does it?

The Farmers Weekly – always a good source of gossip – is saying that they have heard from an ‘industry source’ that Defra will go for two free-shooting pilot areas – in Gloucestershire and Devon.  That’ll please farmers in Somerset,  Cornwall and the West Midlands no end, of course.  As I’ve mentioned in this blog before, any badger cull is likely to disadvantage some farmers – either through perturbation effects spreading the disease or through simply not being part of the trial.  We’ll have to await the details – it there are any – to find out what’s what.

This week’s Farmers Weekly (page 6) has a photograph of Lord Krebs who led one of the biggest studies of badgers and bTB under a headline ‘Bovine TB expert slams futility of badger cull‘.  Lord Krebs is quoted as saying that culling was not an effective policy and that enhanced biosecurity is needed in the short term and a vaccine in the long term.

[registration_form]