This afternoon the Wild Justice petition calling for an end to Badger shooting will be ‘debated’ in Westminster Hall by backbench MPs and will receive statements from Shadow and actual DEFRA ministers.
No doubt the debate will wander all over the place with MPs spouting quite a lot of nonsense that makes them look foolish as they are simply reading out inaccurate briefings supplied to them by others. That’s my guess anyway. Part of this spouting will probably be about the efficacy of culling as a bTB measure – see previous blog – but that isn’t really what the Wild Justice petition was about.
The petition – click here – was about whether the method of killing free-living Badgers chosen by DEFRA was (and is) or wasn’t (and isn’t) humane. Just a reminder, this is the full text of the Wild Justice petition:
Shooting of Badgers is licensed by Natural England as part of the DEFRA Badger cull. 24,000+ Badgers were shot in 2019.
Shooting is poorly monitored and Wild Justice believes it has never met the animal welfare standards recommended by a 2014 Independent Expert Panel, whose recommendations were accepted by DEFRA. This method of culling is inhumane and should be banned immediately.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/333693
The consequences of moving away from free shooting of Badgers would be that more Badgers would have to be killed through cage-trapping if the cull were continued. The reason that this is opposed by farming interests is that it requires much greater expertise and is more expensive – correct me if I am wrong.
The current DEFRA policy ignores, or at least gives vanishingly low priority to, welfare concerns. It prioritises expediency and cheaper cost over the inevitable suffering imposed on tens of thousands of Badgers over the course of the cull and in the years to come.
I wonder how many MPs will even address the welfare issues – I expect to be in Westminster Hall listening to the debate and keeping count.
This is a subject about which, in theory, proponents and opponents of a Badger cull might agree. I bet they won’t…
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For any MPs who want to address the issue raised by the petition here are some notes:
- whether one believes that the Badger cull is working or not in terms of reducing bovine TB infections, shooting of free-living Badgers is an inhumane way to carry out a cull of a mammal.
- thousands of Badgers are shot every year, in the dark, with rifles. A smaller number are cage-trapped and then humanely dispatched. During the course of this Natural England-licensed, DEFRA-promoted, cull, well over 100,000 free-running Badgers have been shot in the English countryside.
- an expert panel convened by DEFRA under the chairmanship of Prof Ranald Munro, reported in 2014 that shooting of Badgers could not be considered humane if more than 5% of those shot took longer than 5 minutes to die. In pilot culls 6-18% of Badgers died more slowly than this. One Badger in this small sample of monitored shooting took over 13 minutes to die. DEFRA has ignored this advice. These data were derived from observers being present, and known to be present, when Badgers were shot – the vast majority of Badger shots are made unmonitored and it is impossible to believe that under those circumstances the welfare standards of shooting will be maintained at what was already an unsatisfactory level
- reporting by Natural England of the culls they have licensed show that the recommended criteria for quick deaths have never been met in the field (and the vast majority of kills take place unseen by any monitors).
- the British Veterinary Association withdrew its support for shooting of free-running Badgers in 2015 stating that it could only support culling that was both effective and humane. Clearly they agreed with the expert panel that the cull was not humane enough to support.
- at a time when the Animal Sentience Bill is passing through Parliament we are seeing a Natural England-licensed, DEFRA-promoted inhumane mass slaughter of a much-loved native mammal.
- even if the Badger cull were effective it cannot be claimed to be humane and yet DEFRA and NE appear callously unbothered about this aspect of their cull.
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Very well said Mark. Fullest support. I don’t suppose much will be changed by this debate. However it is very valuable nevertheless because it helps to highlight the callousness of DEFRA and this rotten Government and their adherence to their bankrupt policy of slaughtering badgers with little or no effect on reducing bTB.
Wild Justice is doing a really good job in fighting and legally challenging these awful and cruel actions perpetrated by this rotten Government.
One can’t help really looking forward so much to the day when the electorate and a new Government clears our of Defra, Mr Eustice and all his rotten clique. We and nature and our environment will then be in a much, much better place. in so many ways.
Having read you debrief of the debate Mark, to my mind it pretty well confirms what I said in my original comment above, that the approach of my many Tory MPs to nature, is that if it gets in the way, kill it and destroy it. What people we still have supposedly close to running the country. They really are still harbouring the Victorian attitude to nature, especially Mr. Loader.
Good to read that the Labour Party is supporting vaccination of badgers instead of their callous and cruel destruction. A responsible, scientific, pragmatic, humane and effective approach to tackling the disease. Let’s all hope it won’t be too long before they can put their approach into practice.