Don't badger the badger

From an animal welfare perspective, one of the most depressing things about the Tory/Torylite Junta is its insistence on restoring fox hunting, and on carrying out a badger cull in England under the pretext of dealing with Bovine TB.

The arguments over fox hunting have been well-rehearsed, of course. Anyone who wants a summary of the case against, just send me a stamped addressed envelope. It is to be expected of the Tories, of course, as the party which is propped up by the landed gentry, that they would try and reverse the hunting ban. Not that the hunting ban was ever properly enforced in the first place, anyway. It’s amazing, isn’t it? We always seem to be able to magic lots of extra policemen out of thin air when there is a miners’ strike, or when a fascist dictator wants his goon squad to be able to run through central London alongside the olympic flag, but when it comes to the law of the land, we are seemingly more selective. Anyway, I digress. If fox hunting had been a working-class sport, it would have been abolished 150 years ago.

Bovine TB has, it is true, been a proverbial thorn in the side of British dairy farmers, who have, it is equally true, been quick to blame the badgers. And yes, badgers do have a reservoir of bovine TB in the wild. So far, so true. But badgers are not unique in this. Other wild animals, including deer, also incubate the m. bovis strain. This is my first problem with just culling the badger, as a strategy. It ignores the existence of other potential sources of the disease in the wild. Quite deliberately, else otherwise the proponents of culling would have to admit that the only effective cull strategy would be to cull everything. Turn the countryside into a nuclear wasteland, and concrete over the green fields of England, right up to the farm gate. Farmers don’t like admitting that this is the logical conclusion of that line of logic, because it clashes with their self-assumed mantle as guardians of the countryside. Yet it is true, nevertheless.

Even assuming culling badgers alone was the answer, that in itself is still fraught with illogicalities and inconsistencies. Badgers have no idea of human boundaries. So supposing you decide to set your cull area to a particular boundary – parish, area, council, it doesn’t matter – two things will happen: surviving badgers in the area will decide to move on to safer climes and wander off elsewhere, taking any infection which may be present with them, while new badgers from outside the area will move in, when they realise there is less competition for food in an area of fewer competitors.

So, in fact, far from making the bovine TB situation better, a cull may actually make it worse. Don’t take my word for it, though.

A report in Nature (Donnelly et al, Nature 439, 843, Feb 2006) based on a large scale and randomised field experiment recently provided strong and significant evidence that culling badgers actually exacerbated the problem by raising the incidence of TB in cattle living nearby.

The Independent Scientific Group (ISG) on Cattle TB concluded (16/6/2007) that culling the wild animals would not halt the spread of the disease by any meaningful extent and "may make matters worse." This report is the summation of 10 years of scientific research, costing 50 million pounds, which saw the killing of 11,000 badgers in the Randomised Badger Culling Trial.

Instead, the ISG advised that substantial reductions in TB can be achieved by improving cattle-based control methods, including electric fencing around farm buildings, better controls on cattle movement through zoning or herd attestation, strategic use of gamma-interferon blood tests in both routine and pre-movement testing, quarantine of purchased cattle, and shorter testing intervals, to name but a few.

The problem is that the NFU didn't like the conclusion, because country folk always know better than they there townie scientists. It came as no surprise that this independent scientists' report was immediately and forcefully attacked by the farmers and NFU which claimed, with no basis, that the ISG's suggestions would be worthless if the cycle of re-infection from badgers was not broken.

Given the Tories' penchant for jumping on bandwagons, and given their disregard for animal welfare generally (see also under Fox Hunting above) they obviously saw this issue as an easy way to hoover up votes in rural constituencies, which is how we come to be here today. It's nothing to do with a burning desire to eradicate bovine TB or make intensive farming more humane on the part of David Cameron.

What a shame badgers don’t get to vote