IT IS rather hilariously silly that John Blackwell, president of the British Veterinary Association, is now engaged in a "furious" debate with minister George Eustice as to whether shooting free-running badgers is a humane and sensible way to tackle the 'badger problem'.

Ministers have surprisingly not in fact confirmed continuing the two Gloucestershire/Somerset pilot culls, plus two more in Devon/Dorset.

Perhaps my messages to chief vet Nigel Gibbens and DEFRA chief scientist Ian Boyd actually gave them pause to check the lack of any sound science base for costly pointless culls.

Do ministers really want to waste millions on extra policing to protect shooters from protestors again this summer?

In truth, badgers got the blame for being a widespread self-sustaining reservoir of TB back in the 1970s simply because MAFF vets got things spectacularly wrong in unbelievably ruling out cattle as this reservoir.

But as Francis classic on "Bovine TB" 1947 noted, if a reactor with even very slight lung tubercle lesions is left in a herd, spread of TB within the herd will be more or less rapid, so all the new cases of TB arising may then move to a scatter of new herds causing further breakdowns.

It should have been blindingly obvious at he the outset, that there was no widespread badger TB reservoir.

The clean ring culls and badger population Studies found TB spillover to just a few badgers in a clan or two at the epicentre of the previous herd breakdown.

TB rapidly died out in these incredibly small micro-pockets of TB.

So, all the scatter of new herd breakdowns, some 60 per cent in hotspots, and 95-100 per cent outside them, occur in areas TB-free in either cattle or badgers. Cases which are supposedly caused by badgers are in fact simply caused by, and first identified these early new TB reactors, without visible lung lesions, so-called unconfirmed cattle cases.

No armies of badgers marching outwards by 10 miles /a, and embarrassingly, no TB badgers found in culls afterwards either (badgersandtb.com). So why shoot the messenger?

Any further badger culls/vaccinations are utterly pointlessmindless, since Old Brock has never been the problem in the first case.

Martin Hancox

Stroud