JAMIE Wiseman recently told readers that new licences have been issued to ‘continue’ badger culling.

I want to clarify a few points: He reported that anti-cull campaigners say the practice is ‘cruel, ineffective and costly’.

This statement should be attributed, not to campaigners, but to the Government’s own independent expert panel as this was their conclusion from the first year of killing in Gloucestershire.

The panel’s report also said: “It is extremely likely that up to 22 per cent of badgers that were shot at were still alive after five minutes, and therefore at risk of experiencing marked pain. We are concerned at the potential for suffering that these figures imply”.

This led them to the view that the killing is ‘inhumane’.

The last two years of killing has continued without any independent monitoring as the Government chose to disband this panel.

If the practice was deemed to be inhumane while people were scrutinising it, what will be happening now?

Despite the report of the panel and instead of stopping the cull, the zone has been extended to Herefordshire and the north Cotswolds.

It now covers 1,000 sq km of countryside in which all badgers on their nightly run are at risk from shooters who will blast them with a shotgun as they feed from the bait.

In some cases, cages are set and shooters blast the occupants, who may have been there all night.

Culling companies set up for the purpose are looking to kill up to 3,811 badgers this year to meet their Government-set maximum target.

Martin Hancox, a scientific adviser to the Government, has written to this newspaper regularly and told us repeatedly that the root of the spread of this horrendous disease lies within the herd.

The disease remains undetected because of the weakness of the test used to detect it.

The Government admits that the test can miss up to 20 per cent of infected cattle which then remain in the herd to infect other cattle.

Farmers are at best deluded or at worst deliberately misled into thinking that killing every badger will release them from the devastation and heartache which this disease brings.

Killing badgers, most of which are perfectly healthy, will make ‘no meaningful difference’ to the spread of TB in cattle.

Molly Scott-Cato is right. She says: “The policy in England is nothing more than mass cruelty supported by bad science”.

This is why hundreds of people are willing to come to the killing zones from all over the country to walk peacefully and quietly through the night in search of wounded badgers.

This is all they feel they can do as all other democratic channels have failed.

They exorcise their anger by showing compassion for badgers in the face of such dogged adherence to a Government policy which is doomed to failure.

Meanwhile the badgers are sacrificed for no good reason.

Cherril Pope

Nailsworth