With the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) all set to restart the English badger culls that were so disastrous last year, people are beginning to question the safety of the exercise. In particular, they are looking at the poor standard of policing.
“I’ve looked at science and policies a lot in my career, and I think this is one of the worst policies I have ever seen.”
Most people would agree that England has a problem with bovine tuberculosis among its cattle. But many do not agree with the government’s view that badgers are to blame; that it is diseased badgers that are infecting the cattle; that the disease can be controlled by killing badgers rather than looking at farming practices; a view which ignores the science that says culling badgers will have little effect and may make matters worse.
The UK Secretary for the Environment Owen Paterson, called by some the “worst Environment Secretary ever” because of his support for so many ecologically damaging initiatives, disappeared in February. Having been responsible for an expensive and highly unpopular badger cull, he became embroiled in the crisis that brought a lot of southern England to its knees – catastrophic flooding.
The British Government seems as determined as ever to pursue its policy of killing badgers to prevent TB in cattle. This despite the “complete failure” of the pilot culls to reach their targets, the leaked information from the as yet unpublished report from the Independent Expert Panel and the slow but steady fall of the incidence of TB in English cattle due, not to dead badgers, but to tighter testing and cattle
These pilots are not on our land, but the ways the culls are being carried out is increasingly worrying and we are now concerned for the credibility and usefulness of the exercise. This sense of shifting scientific sands is a real issue for us, particularly if faced with any future proposition for wider culling.
— Patrick Begg, National Trust rural enterprise director
