MADAM – The long running badgers and TB debate has rather expectedly reached new heights of Alice In Wonderland folly at the end of 2014.

Two new major ‘insights’ into the problem were achieved.

It was extremely helpful of minister Liz Truss, with chief vet Nigel Gibbens, plus scientific monitors Natural England to burn the midnight oil for the 5 o’clock announcement on Thursday, December 18 just as parliament ended.

It seems that this year’s two pilot badger culls were a great success; they were humane, most badgers died within five minutes of being shot; safe, no stray dog walkers shot inadvertently.

However, Dr Gibbens did admit that although the culls should continue another three years to 2017 (5 years in total) it was a bit worrying that the Gloucestershire cull only removed half the badgers necessary (again this year) due to ‘animal rights’ interference (274 instead of the 615 target; Somerset 341, was over the target of 316).

Meurig Raymond and the NFU farmers were delighted, so are urgently demanding a rollout of further pilots next year.

He claimed the cull has achieved a drop of a third in herd breakdowns in Somerset, although it is hard to see how the total cull over two years of 2494 badgers, only c. 25 of which might have been super-infectious TB cases from c. 300 sq.km.can have made the slightest difference.

And a number of herds under long term restriction going clear was due to use of a better late TB ENFERPLEX test, nothing to do with the cull.

Most probably extra policing will have cost a few million, which is a scandalous waste of police resources with cuts in front-line policing imminent.

Actually this is very adroit politics, an 11th hour ‘urgent’ announcement a la Jo Moore.

The beauty of this late initiative is that it is extremely likely there will be no party in overall control after the May 2015 election, so promises need not be kept. And Labour wont be able to scrap culls either.

Seemingly too, the campaigning by Dr May and Team Badger for badger vaccination has paid off.

Liz Truss agrees badger ring vaccination is a good idea to stop the spread from high risk to edge & low risk areas.

And The EC has just awarded GB a record £25 million to tackle TB, specifically for ring vaccination, and other measures.

This is rather a drop in the ocean since bovine TB costs are running at towards £100 million per annum.

Hilarious that ring vaccinating badgers will be a spectacular waste of time and money, absolutely guaranteed to fail, since the spread of TB outwards is entirely by missed TB cattle (early TB so-called unconfirmed cases), there are no armies of badgers emigrating outwards, and there is no background TB in either cattle or badgers ‘out there’ in these frontier TB-free areas.

Alas poor Brock, yet again victim not villain.

Martin Hancox MA Oxon ex-government TB panel

Stroud