On 14th December last year the Environment Secretary, Caroline Spelman, announced to the House of Commons that the government would run two pilot schemes to cull badgers in England. The pilots will assess the viability of addressing the problem of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in beef and dairy cattle by shooting wild badgers, which are known to be carriers of the disease.
Two areas have been chosen, one in West Gloucestershire and
one in West Somerset, both hot spots for bTB.
The pilots are expected to last six weeks beginning in August or
September this year.
The cull is naturally controversial. It’s opposed by the
RSPCA, The Wildlife Trust, The Badger Trust and by roughly 60,000 members of
the public who responded to the government’s own consultation exercise. A poll conducted by GfK NOP for the BBC last
summer indicated that 63% of the public opposed it too.
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| Caroline Spelman Minister for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs |
But in the words of Ms Spelman, ‘Doing nothing is not an
option’.
bTB is rife throughout South West England and Wales and is
spreading steadily to other parts of the country. Badgers are known to spread the disease
through saliva and urine. The government’s
response is to enforce compulsory skin tests for all cattle every 60 days and
to slaughter infected beasts. In 2010,
25,000 cattle were slaughtered in England alone, costing the taxpayer £91m
in compensation for farmers. Farms under
TB restrictions are not allowed to export live animals.
These policies hit dairy farms particularly. Although the government pays a market rate
for slaughtered cattle, the farmer receives nothing for lost milk production
and they have no option but to shoot male calves which might otherwise be sold
for rearing elsewhere.
Although badgers are protected in the UK, many farmers have
already taken the law in to their own hands and many badgers have been gassed
in their sets, yet still the disease spreads.
The trouble is that culling does not work.
DEFRA says that the culls will be ‘science
led’, but as Natural England, the government’s own wildlife advisors, have
pointed out, it has been tried before, in the 70s and the 90s, and it proved
ineffective at holding back the spread of the disease.
Moreover, an official £50m, ten-year study conducted
for the government by a specially formed Independent Scientific Group (ISG),
found that culling was ineffective at controlling the disease, and in fact
caused it to spread more rapidly as surviving badgers scattered throughout the
countryside, an effect known as ‘perturbation’.
Prof Lord John Krebs of Oxford University, who instigated
the study, concluded in July 2011 that a four-year intensive cull which
eradicated around 70% of the badger population might reduce incidence of the
disease in cattle by 12 to 16%.
This is the reason that the previous Labour government rejected
the proposals for a cull and also why similar plans were shelved last year by
the Welsh government.
So what is the answer?
Well in the first instance let’s get this problem back in
perspective. The reasons that the
government insists on slaughtering animals are:
·
To protect public health
·
Animal welfare
·
To protect Britain’s export market
But let’s take a closer look at these arguments.
Work by two senior zoologists, Prof David Torgerson of York
University and Prof Paul Torgerson of Zurich University, has shown that there
is little or no danger to public health posed by bTB provided milk is pasteurized. In fact meat from infected cattle slaughtered
under the government policy is currently sold for human consumption, so
obviously the government agrees.
They also point out that most cattle exposed to the
bacterium will not fully develop the disease within the time of their normal
commercial life, and many won’t develop it at all. In other words, the government’s policy which
has been in place for 60 years is probably excessive and largely unnecessary.
The claims on animal welfare are clearly absurd. Slaughtering animals because they might
develop a disease to which a vaccine is available cannot be represented as
concern for their welfare.
Trade with EU countries is often cited as a factor. Well EU laws in this area only concern live
animals. In the last 20 years Britain’s
exports of live cattle have never exceeded £3.3 million in annual value which
hardly justifies annual control costs of almost £100m.
So should we do nothing and simply accept a level of TB in
our cattle herd?
Well no. What is
rarely mentioned is that there is a viable vaccine for bTB.
Vaccinating cattle is currently seen as a non-starter
because it is outlawed by EU law. The
current skin tests do not differentiate between an immunised cow and an
infected one. Further, DEFRA argues that
“Not all vaccinated animals would be protected from TB and therefore
vaccination alone will not be sufficient to demonstrate disease free status…
and allow trade in those animals”. This is a disingenuous argument, as use of
the skin test is also imperfect.
Currently it is estimated that one in five animals slaughtered under
government guidelines is actually a false positive. Similarly the test misses around 20% of
infected cattle which may then be transported quite legally.
Would we reject vaccination of children against polio on the
grounds that it’s not 100% effective? Of
course not.
Vaccinating badgers is also ruled out because of assumptions
about cost and difficulty. But another
of DEFRA’s own agencies, The Food and Environment Research Agency, FERA,
recently completed a badger vaccination project over a 100km²
area near Stroud in Gloucestershire. In
a report published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society they concluded,
“In a clinical field
study, BCG vaccination of free-living badgers reduced the incidence of positive
serological test results by 73.8 per cent. …BCG vaccination of badgers could
comprise an important component of a comprehensive programme of measures to
control bovine TB in cattle.”
In fact, the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust, which has
conducted its own trials, estimates that badger vaccination is a viable
alternative to culling without the drawbacks, and could be carried out for only
£51
per hectare.
Only two diseases have ever been eradicated in the world;
smallpox and rinderpest, the latter being a cattle disease. Both were
eradicated using vaccination.
What DEFRA should do is as follows:
- stop slaughtering infected cattle immediately
- allow farmers to vaccinate their cattle at their own discretion
- initiate a programme of vaccinating wild badgers
It will still take years but this is the only approach that will ever eradicate bTB from our shores.
Government ministers of all hues often feel obliged to be
seen to do something, even when it makes no sense. The Conservative party moreover has always
been the traditional party of the countryside and the farming lobby, so the
pressure to do something dramatic is commensurately greater. But killing badgers will do nothing to
eliminate bovine TB, it may even exacerbate the problem and it will do immense
damage to our wildlife. Far from being science led, the decision to cull badgers looks like a purely political one.
Under these
circumstances the proposed cull is pointless, barbaric and just plain wrong. Our wildlife should not be treated as a political prop.
I will leave the last word to the Badger Trust which has
raised a legal challenge to the cull and which summed up the situation
concisely.
“Badger culling, if it comes to pass, will represent a
triumph of prejudice over science, a triumph of the feel-good factor over
commonsense and a triumph of political expediency at the expense of a gullible
industry.”
