‘Bovine TB eradication strategy delivering results‘
was the headline of a press release issued by Defra on Thursday last week.
Defra went on ‘The comprehensive strategy to eradicate bovine TB in England is delivering results with more than half the country on track to be officially free of the disease by the end of this Parliament, Environment Secretary Elizabeth Truss confirmed today.‘
I was expecting some pretty spectacular results from such an announcement but all it means is that badgers have been killed and those parts of the country that don’t have bovine TB really don’t have bovine TB.
It is possible that Defra just felt they had to say something, even though they don’t have much to say, in order to remind the rest of government that they still exist.
This time last year there were rumours that Defra might come to some sort of a conclusion on Hen Harriers after having set up a group to argue about it in a closed room for ages, but we still haven’t seen any credible strategy from Defra.
And then there is the issue of lead ammunition on which Defra refuses to opine despite having had a weighty scientific report for over six months that points to environmental and human health harm from the current position. And, then there is the fact that poor old Andy Richardson has been waiting for a response to his e-petition (the one that asks for the poisoning to continue) for over a month.
Under Liz Truss, Defra’s reputation as a government department is at its lowest-ever ebb. It’s so easy to point to its failings that I thought I would ask some wildlife NGOs what they thought were Defra’s successes of 2015. After a certain amount of head-scratching they came back to me. Come back later to read what they said.
Ban driven grouse shooting – we are now in the last month of the e-petition.
Ban toxic lead ammunition – if you are quick you will be the 8000th signature
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Sadly, it looks like their pointless badger cull could be rolled out to nine more counties next year. And they are changing the rules, so that culling won’t just be for 6 weeks: it could last from June through to February…..so watch out cubs and pregnant females. I’m so angry, I could rant for hours. How on Earth are Defra getting away with destroying so many different aspects of UK wildlife?
A blood sacrifice to the great god NFU to ensure a good harvest.
Quite right, Saffy.
And if the dead badgers are not being tested for BTB, how convenient: maybe they would show up as uninfected.
So much for being ‘science-led’.
Is it true that Defra will not allow any more badgers to be vaccinated because of an alleged worldwide shortage of the antibiotic? That seems to be just another way of trying to make themselves look as if they are in control and in the right. How much truth is there in any aspect of this?
Certainly none in the notion that an antibiotic might be used as a vaccine
Indeed. The area they are going to define as TB-free is the area already defined as low risk (bovine TB prevalance ~0.1%), which is surely as low as it is ever going to get, and stable at that level since 2006. As far as I know, there is no badger culling in that area, so this is purely a definition matter. The press release is confusing the success of process (achieving the cull targets) in the higher risk areas with this planned definitional shift in the rest of the country. I assume the confusion is deliberate.
And so it continues with no testing of victims of the cull for bovine TB, staggering. Maybe people power is the option of last resort, given we no longer have a creditable department responsible for the protection of ‘our’ natural heritage. Perhaps a campaign to boycott UK dairy products and beef? In the event of a boycott, I wonder how long it would take members of the NFU to change their organisation’s stance on the badger cull?
Careful about a boycott. The NFU doesn’t represent most farmers (only ~20% are members I think) and is heavily biased in attitude and membership towards large farmers. A long time ago when I worked for a WT we were arranging a joint press event with the NFU. The regional chair of NFU was in our offices as we looked for a venue. We worked with many farmers; he got more and more embarrassed as he worked his way down the list, calling his head office, to find that not a single one was an NFU member.
All the more amazing that Govt acts as if the NFU speaks for all farmers! Let’s not fall into the same error.
Time to stop the hysteria & crocodile tears. If you’ve ever tried to manage a population & keep it healthy you’d realise the futility of cattle only measures when the wildlife maintenance host that has a significant disease level remains untested & unmanaged in the HRA. The rank stupidity of those who’d prefer to do nothing about badger tb is based on ignorance & willfull blindness, an indulgence of those who prefer to conserve sick populations perhaps because they bear no responsibility for the consequences of their meddling & interference. It’s time to roll tb back & those standing in the way of this should seriously question their ethical stance because to date all they’ve achieved is an increase in tb in badgers, cattle overspill hosts & devastated the lives of farming families for decades
Phil,
if badger control reduced TB in cattle we might be having a different conversation. But it doesn’t. Actually the evidence is that it may make it worse by causing animals to move around more. Cow towing to the urge to “do something” is killing badges and farm businesses.
What works, at least a lot better than culling badgers, is also known, or at least it works for the farmers that do it. Giving badgers their own mineral licks near their setts. Double fencing (“TB fencing” as it was called back in the 80s) to prevent cattle to cattle transmission across farm boundaries. Things like that.
Badger culling is a triumph of ignorance, revenge, and political lobbying power over evidence. That’s why so many people object to it so strongly. It doesn’t bloody work, and fudging the numbers and the methodology like DEFRA has won’t change that basic flaw.
Mineral licks will not work full stop,walked across a field of cattle this morning(the owner has no wish for the Badgers to be culled that had made their presence obvious by the large amount of disturbance where they dug for worms etc).Badgers will always use the same fields that cattle graze,it is simply impossible to stop both species using the same fields for practical farmers.
Think you also would find the double fencing was for clearing up Contagious Abortion,it is very unlikely BTB is spread in the great outdoors from herd to herd over fencing.
Dennis, I’ve been trying to track down the ref, someone else may have it. A farmer in Somerset, dairy I think, with never any bTB despite being in a hotspot. He did what his dad had done before everyone became obsessed with badgers.
He noted that a significant source of transmission was via mineral licks, which badgers like too. However given the choice they used the one provided at their sett not the one shared with cattle. One significant transmission route removed at minimal cost. Nothing to do with whether they shared fields (which obviously they do).
Can’t speak to contagious abortion – they were called TB fences by everyone and that’s what our tenant graziers (who’d been there for ever and still are) called them. And the guy in Somerset called them TB fences too, and still maintained them for that purpose.
Yes can see that licks could well cut down on transmission but only slightly cut down as when looking at calving cows in the middle of the night the Badgers from a sett on our fields would often be there rooting for worms often under cowpats also using the outside of the fields for their latrine and unlike cats they do not cover it up and guess they just pee all over the grass.
Cannot understand this obsession that the general public seem to think farmers are able to keep Badgers out of fields.It is not practical.
For farmers and Badgers the need is to get cattle and Badgers clean.
Really weird how it appears to me after speaking to what is supposed to be a high up Badger group person that they seem to be quite happy to vaccinate cattle and let the disease carry on in Badgers,that cannot be good for Badgers.
Jbc, let’s not forget that the mode of transmission is still unknown, so this means that bTB may not even be infectious. To assume that it is infectious is only a grand assumption. TB tells a story, which concerns the ‘walling off’ of a poison to create homeostasis. This means that TB is a metamorphosis from within, or in other words, an inside-out process. The infectious ‘outside-in’ process is a mere theory that cannot ever be anything more than a theory. This means that TB is not infectious, it is an immune response based on an environmental threat based upon the individual animal. This threat could be nuclear pollution or a pesticide or contaminated drinking water or whatever else may be stressing animal. Killing badgers or cattle with no mode of transmission, apart from a theory, is very bad science. Let’s also take note that an immune response is not a ‘terrible infectious disease’, it is only an immune response. It may not even be related to TB. I will be bringing out a new article on the ‘pointlessness of biosecurity’ in another week or so. This covers this issue in depth from a psychological, sociological and philosophical point of view. John Wantling, Rochdale. TB not infectious
“crocodile tears”
Think your on wafer thin ground there Phil.
Think back to your appearance on TV a year or two back when you affected some ‘crocodile tears’, and came up with story of a the cow that you were having to cull. Yes – the one you claimed you used to milk when you came back from school’. If that story were true then the cow must have been over 25 years old!
Phil, please can you answer the one main argument against the cull; which is that, as far as is published, no badgers in the cull have been given a postmortem to see if they do have TB. Such action doesn’t present itself as scientific. I’d be interested to hear your opinion on this point, please.
As a young microbiologist in the late 1950s, one of my jobs was to test raw (unpasteurised ) milk for bTB. It was not uncommon and frequently isolated, especially from bulk milk tankers collected from several farms. Disease could be passed on to humans and manifested as tuberculosis but probably of reduced virulence. I can’t remember any discussion of sources of transmission to cattle but my remit was human not veterinary. With the subsequent legislation on the pasteurisation of milk and dairy products the problem (in relation to human disease) was considered insignificant. If you have time or interest you may find this article of interest. http://www.bovinetb.co.uk/article.php?article_id=24.
Yet cattle controls have worked in Wales and Btb in cattle has increased in Somerset….you work it out.
To understand why DEFRA persist in the badger cull we must not forget the development lobby. Do they want this iconic, much loved and legally protected native species to thrive? Or would they press for eradication?
Government have committed to build 1 million new houses in 5yrs. One house sale every 3 to 5 minutes between now and 2020. Everywhere, landowners are looking to cash in on landbanks that would not previously be considered suitable for housing. The current badger law can halt sett disturbance for housing development during the 6 month breeding season. A tory property developer leads Natural England. Licencing is now in the hands of NE ‘sustainable development’ team who are increasingly driven by a ‘time is money’ performance ethic. Oxfordshire has committed to increasing housing stock by 40-50% Does the governement need any other incentive to roll the badger cull out more widely?
From Defra’s own stats, more cows die in farm accidents each year than are destroyed due to Btb!
‘War is peace’
I can’t believe the bullshit they expect the public to swallow. Let’s eradicate all our wild life but we must keep pheasants and grouse so the rich can kill them. What a fucked up country we live in
Can’t believe our Host allowed that. Fucked-up should be hyphenated
No need for such crude language on the internet.
There are equally appropriate words to express your displeasure.
It awakened the public in 1928, so it might provoke action now?
As for defra and words to express displeasure, sadly Dennis they leave me almost speechless or to use a moderm term ‘gobsmaked’?
A cull might be the kindest solution, then at least the real enemy can be seen instead of being hidden by environmental sabateurs (yes, there are some good staff I know)?