FURTHER to Brian May’s recent visit to Stroud College, concerning voting and “Community spirits”... hilarious to learn that a “furious row” has broken out on Twitter, as to how to vote to stop badger culls, and bringing back hunting (although it never really ended).

Neither Queen’s Dr Brian May or Dominic Dyer CEO of the Badger Trust and Team Badger have a clue as to how politics actually works in 'realpolitik'.

It is obvious neither the Tories or Labour will get an overall majority of a magic 320 seats come May 7.

So there will be no roll-out of more culls, or utterly meaningless badger vaccinations.

Best to vote for the Monster Raving Loonies.

In fact, a dog's breakfast coalition will almost certainly bring in further culls, because conservationists have not been explaining to farmers that badgers cannot possibly be “The main cause of the spread of TB".

No-one in 44 years has explained how badgers might give cows a respiratory lung infection, because it is not happening.

TB spread cattle-to-cattle needs prolonged close contact in barns to spread bacilli in aerosol droplet infection.

There have never been enough super-infectious badgers to achieve this, just 17 in 14 years in the textbook Woodchester badger population of 350 badgers in nine sq km.

Far too few badgers with TB anyway, just 6,123 out of 53,130 sampled 1972-2005.

So, all the new herd breakdowns allegedly “due to badgers” have in fact been caused by, and first identified by early TB reactor cattle, without TB lung lesions, so-called unconfirmed reactors: 245, 000 out of 410,000 cattle removed since foot and mouth.

The spread of cattle TB amongst cattle has absolutely nothing to do with badgers.

Martin Hancox

Stroud