MADAM – Badgers outnumbered.

Sadly, farmers and vets are still shouting from the rooftops that ‘badgers are the main cause of the spread of TB’ so culls or vaccines are essential.

They are doing themselves a major disservice, because this is simply a wrongful case of mistaken identity.

The whole point of annual testing of cattle is to find and remove infectious cases before they can spread TB within the herd.

It is so successful that new cases are found before they can develop lung tubercle lesions, hence so-called unconfirmed cases.

It is these new cases, moving to new herds which cause new TB breakdowns, some 20 million farm-to-farm moves a year.

Everyone wrongly assumes they are false positive TB-free, so badgers wrongly get the blame.

But in fact, there are no TB badgers found after these breakdowns.

Since foot and mouth in 2001, some 245,000 unconfirmed reactors out of 410,000 cattle removed; spreading TB within the cattle population.

In fact Defra data, found from 1972-2005, out of 53,130 badgers a mere 6,123 actually had TB, so they were hardly a main cause of spread of “Bovine TB” (badgersandtb.com).

Besides, no-one has explained how badgers are supposed to give cows a respiratory lung infection in the first place.

Prof Godfray’s recent review admitted they just do not know.

And chief scientist Ian Boyd happily admitted the badger contribution to cattle TB might be six, 16, 50, 100 or zero per cent.

Martin Hancox

Stroud