Badgers are not the problem

The 40-year-old badger TB debate, shows no sign of ending, even though it has now vanished off into a virtual reality parallel Alice in Wonderland universe.

“New” light has just been delivered on the wholly imaginary “problem” via two results:- While I have every sympathy with the farmers whose six herds have recently succumbed to TB on the National Trust Killerton Estate in Devon, this unexpectedly has demonstrated once again that badgers are not the problem.

Vaccinating some 539 badger in 20 sq km has clearly not prevented these outbreaks. And if there were any TB badgers “out there” it is hard to see how they suddenly “decided” to infect six different herds.

One farm has been having breakdowns every two-three years which is exactly in line with data from the Defra new strategy launched recently, a minority of herds have TB cattle which do not become reactors until several years after infection.

And “closed herds” with no bought-in cattle, and good double fencing, are nevertheless exposed to re-infection, eg. via visits to agricultural shows, shared water sources, or even slurry on post vans going between farm yards six days a week; TB herds are often clustered, so there is “contiguous” spread of TB.

The two pilot culls have just ended as a magnificent success according to NFU leaders such as Andrew Guest.

But in fact the Somerset cull may have achieved the cloud cuckoo land target of 316 badgers; the Gloucestershire one only managed 253 ie. half the magically “necessary “ 70 per cent figure of 615 badgers.

Lack of any genuine Independent Scientific Panel scrutiny has meant the actual numbers of infectious TB badgers is unknown, but extrapolating from the Krebs/ISG cull of 11,000 badgers, there might have been a mere 60-80 out of 569 badgers with TB, and perhaps l0 (two percent) superexcretors that might have been a risk to other badgers or cattle in several 100 sq.km.

Clearly this costly “scientific” cull will have had absolutely nil impact on cattle TB.

Neither did the 11,000 RBCT cull – no difference between cull/no cull areas (see Death of the Great Debate, www.badgersandtb.com).

I wonder if the extra policing costs of the culls will be c. £2 million again this year?

Neither badger culls nor badger vaccinations will have the slightest effect on the spread of cattle TB, because all the herd breakdowns supposedly “due to badgers” are in fact caused by mis-identified TB cattle.

M Hancox

Stroud