THE Badger Trust AGM was held at the University of the West of England, Bristol, on Saturday, April 18 and included a lively debate on the long running badgers and TB “crisis”.

The expert panel included John Bourne, who oversaw the Krebs/RBCT Cull; a Gloucestershire vet, Roger Blowey, John Blackwell, chairman of the BVA, the British Vet Association, and Mark Jones of the Born Free Foundation.

Of course no-one “killed off” the debate, because over 44 years the whole saga hinges on circumstantially finding TB badgers after herd breakdowns, which supposedly have not just caught TB from the cows, so must be the hidden self-sustaining source ( http://youtu.be/-Typg5A9zjM).

Sadly all down to two silly mistakes back in the 1970s.

MAFF Vets unbelievably decided (wrongly) that only cows with open visible lung lesions could pass TB on to other cows and badgers, and they were so rare two per cent of reactor cattle, that badgers must be the source of herd TB.

The second mistake was to assume (wrongly) that all the new cattle TB cases arising by cattle-to-cattle spread within the herd which had not yet developed visible lesions, did not have TB; i.e. were false positive cases.

But in fact they were merely unconfirmed newly-infected cows.

Some 245,000 out of 410,000 cattle removed since foot and mouth 2001.

And as to badgers, actual TB ones, between 1972-2005, just 6,123 out of 53,130 sampled. So that is why farmers are still insisting that badgers must be the main cause of the spread of TB, but the majority of new herd breakdowns allegedly “due to badgers” are simply caused by and first identified by these unconfirmed cattle.

Martin Hancox

Stroud