THE great badger farce continues.

There is that old chestnut about not seeing the wood for the trees, and seemingly now neither farmers and vets or Defra politicians can “see the badgers for the bovines”.

Technically more badger culls could have started on Wednesday, June 1, being the end of dependent cubs “closed season”.

But the whole highly complex and emotive debate has been mysteriously off the agenda for some two months.

Well, apparently Natural England have been considering applications for nine new Pilot cull areas, and will now doubtless consider licensing them if they meet the somewhat mythical criteria of likelihood of culling 70 per cent of badgers from 90 per cent of accessible land.

Never mind whether they will actually have the slightest effect on cattle TB, which everyone seems to have forgotten, is actually the objective of the absurd shooting of free running badgers.

The £50 million RBCT / Krebs cull of 11,000 badgers had nil effect on cattle TB, accumulated breakdowns identical in reactive versus no cull areas 356 vs 358.

And the £5 million Wales vaccination of 4,500 badgers in the 286 IAA trial had NIL effect on cattle TB either.

Meantime since the left hand has not told the right hand what is going on. DEFRAs consultation last year about 40 years too late, did at last recognise that the 90 per cent or so of new cattle herd TB breakdowns supposedly caused by badgers because the key “index” reactor cow had no confirmatory lung lesions were actually simply caused by newly infected early TB cases.

So the absurdly simple way to stop the spread of bovine = cattle TB by these truly infected early NVL / No Visible Lesion /Unconfirmed reactor cows is pre and post-movement testing.

Clearly edge badger vaccination will not stop the expansion / spread of cattle TB by new cattle TB cases.

So, it turns out badgers are not the main cause of the spread of TB after all.

Tragic that Defra have not passed on this simple message to Natural England, farmers, vets or politicians.

Political expediency pursued way beyond the point of absurdity.

Alas poor Brock, and alas poor farmers misled by Defra incompetence.

Martin Hancox

MA Oxon Ex-government

TB Panel

Stroud