HAVING been on the old government Badger TB Consultative Panel and with 25 years’ involvement, I have come to the sad conclusion that the ‘great badgers and TB debate’ is 100 per cent about politics and pseudoscience.
Farmers and badgers have been badly betrayed by the incompetence of the government’s chief scientific advisers and political ineptness.
I have been unable over some 15 years to get either David Drew or John Marjoram to grasp that badgers are completely irrelevant to solving the cattle TB crisis.
And sadly they seem unwilling, if elected, to get an unambiguous Written Parliamentary Question tabled in parliament which could kill off the cull debate - this requires a written answer:.
‘Would the prime minister David Cameron, and environment minister Liz Truss please confirm that: ‘Despite endlessly repeated farmer claims that “Badgers are the main cause of the spread of TB”, in fact, neither badger culls or badger vaccination will have the slightest impact on TB spread because all the new herd TB breakdowns are caused by, and first identified by early TB reactor cattle which have yet to develop tubercle lung lesions, so-called unconfirmed cases.
‘Some 245,000 unconfirmed reactors out of the 410,000 cattle removed since foot and mouth 2001, and 20 million farm to farm movements per year.
‘Absolutely nothing to do with badgers, a mere 6,123 TB badgers out of 53,130 sampled 1972-2005.
‘The £50 million RBCT/Krebs cull of 11,000 badgers had nil effect on cattle TB, after eight years virtually the same number of herd breakdowns in cull versus no cull areas (1,562 vs 1,668).
‘’The six herd breakdowns on the National Trust Killerton Estate last year happened despite vaccinating 569 badgers in 20 sq km wildlife trust; vaccination too mindless; what a disgraceful waste of scarce charity monies.’ So afraid I will not be voting for either Labour or the Greens, I’d go for the Monster Raving Loonies if they fielded a candidate.
Martin Hancox
Stroud
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