I had a great time at the Badger Trust conference on Saturday – and in talking to many delegates on Friday evening too. There were some old friends there, including some readers of this blog, and one person who had delivered lots of postcards in the Calder Valley promoting Chris Packham’s and Wild Justice’s e-petition. I also very much enjoyed Rosie Woodroffe’s talk at the beginning of the event.
One of the messages that I took away from Rosie’s excellently clear talk was that although culling Badgers will slightly reduce the transmission of Bovine TB most cattle get the disease from other cattle – something between 75% and 99%. Therefore the greatest emphasis should be given to reducing cattle to cattle transmission. that’s what I had always thought.
So why is the government putting so much effort and resource into wiping out Badgers in large parts of the country? The cull really does seem to be driven by farmers rather than by scientists or science. This is a dodgy place for government to end up – spending millions of taxpayers’ money to solve a real problem with an ineffective approach. But that appears to me to be where this government is. The Godfray report hinted at that and gave this government an exit strategy that would fall far short of admitting they were wrong, wrong, wrong but government has not yet responded to it.
The normal response to this from farmers is a loud statement that Bovine TB is a terrible disease and that something needs to be done about it. Bovine TB is a disease about which something needs to be done, and that’s why it’s important to do the right thing not the wrong thing. If it is right that ‘Something needs to be done about it’ then it is all the more important that ‘the thing’ is the right thing. Culling Badgers is perhaps one of the right things under some circumstances but it can never, ever, be ‘the right thing’ because it simply won’t deliver eradication of Bovine TB which is what government has promised and farmers want. It won’t deliver that goal because it isn’t dealing with most of the problem.
But whenever we are in a position where ‘Something must be done about it’ then we tend to grasp at straws. The first example that comes to mind from the conservation side of things is the shooting of Turtle Doves on Malta etc. Now, don’t get me wrong, I oppose the shooting of Turtle Doves on Malta etc but I certainly don’t think that cessation of that shooting will do much to solve the decline of Turtle Doves – the numbers shot are too low (even though they are unacceptably high since much of the shooting is illegal), and other evidence suggests that factors operating in the breeding season and perhaps on the African wintering grounds, are far more important.
The analogy between controlling Bovine TB and saving the Turtle Dove is not precise – but in solving any problem, targetted action and the right action, at the right time, and in the right amounts, are what are needed.
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I remember reading a letter in the Guardian in response to others protesting about the cull from a farmer who said ‘you should see the damage they do in a maize field’. I would therefore guess that some farmers just want to kill badgers and bovine TB literally gives them the licence to do it.
You should see the damage that maize fields do. IMHO ‘we’ would be much better off without them. It is true that maize from one cut produces large amounts of dry matter with good digestibility and protein content that is not particularly sensitive to harvest date but is the erosive damage to soils and the residual compaction worth it?
We could pay farmers not to grow it and reduce the badger population without all the expense and nastiness and we might even bring the hedgehog back from the brink.
When I started working in an NHS Microbiology Lab. in the 1950s my job included testing raw milk for contamination by bacteria including Mycobacterium bovis and Brucellosis. Farmers and their families were particularly affected if they drank milk straight from the dairy cooler but raw milk was also available for doorstep delivery. Bovine TB was a less severe infection than classic TB (M tuberculosis) but unpleasant and often difficult to diagnose in humans.
My point is that bTB has been about for ever, but then it was considered as endemic within dairy cattle and I cannot recall any discussion about transmission from badgers or other sources. The solution was simple, the milk from the infected herd was rendered safe by pasteurisation and the farmer advised not to drink the milk raw. It was outside by knowledge but I can’t recall any culling of cattle. Brucellosis was a nastier disease both for cattle and humans.
You are so right Mark about getting the science right sorted and then targeting the action according to what the science shows. I am afraid this is something that this Government, the NFU, and some farmers are not capable of grasping because they let politics and vested interests dominate.
It is so true that where proper science is not applied, ignored or not considered, so politics dominates. A well run country or organisation should always be guided by sound science. A very good example of how not to follow this course and to let vested interests and politics interfere excessively to the detriment of everything is demonstrated by this awful Government.
The real science (as opposed to vested quackery and figure fiddling) plus the empirical results have always and continue to point in this direction. The badger culling policy is tantamount to spending millions pursuing a single person out of a multitude of small time end-point cannabis users on the basis that he’s the one the surprisingly blinged-up geezer happened to point at out of the window of his tinted kerbside Merc when asked the question “where’s the drug problem?”. That the heavyweights in the beef and dairy industry continue a policy of distraction and chicane around a problem largely of their own making by scapegoating wildlife is perhaps no surprise. More shocking to me is the role that Natural England are playing in continuing to licence the slaughter while wilfully ignoring or refusing to engage with the blatant scientific incongruities.
Some years ago when managing a woodland with a very sizeable badger sett next to an ADAS farm I asked one of the stockmen ‘did the badgers cause any issues on the farm?’ Thinking he might talk about TB his reply came ‘they come into my garden and eat my strawberries!’
Was there any discussion about the impact of badgers on ground nesting birds?