Shrewsbury farmer hoping for badger cull success
Tuesday 20th December 2011, 10:59AM GMT.
A farmer has welcomed Government approval of a cull on badgers – after losing 80 cattle in four years to bovine TB on his Shropshire farm.
Jonathan Lovegrove-Fielden, 62, who owns Oaks Hall Farm, in Longden, near Shrewsbury, said a neighbouring farmer had lost 200 cattle – including young calves – in the last three months due to positive bovine TB testing.
Support – Jonathan Lovegrove-Fielden
Environment secretary Caroline Spelman has given the go-ahead for controlled culling in two pilot areas in early 2012.
More than 25,000 cattle had to be slaughtered in 2010, with badgers largely blamed for carrying the disease and passing it on.
Mr Lovegrove-Fielden said: “I could be considered one of the luckier ones.
“In the last three months my neighbour has lost 200 cattle, including young calves – due to positive TB testing.
“I welcome Environment Secretary, Caroline Spelman, and her approval of the badger cull.
“This is a dreadful disease, the losses of cattle are only half the story.
“The disease has had a stranglehold on livestock farmers across the UK with livelihoods and cash-flows frozen for months and months, the moment a beast which reacts to the test is found.”
Mr Lovegrove-Fielden said the disease needed ‘tackling and quickly’ and added the longer it went on, the more it would spread, and more badgers and cattle would suffer.
He said: “I have no problem with badgers – indeed the reason we have them at home is because we protected them long before the law did.
“However, now many of them are cruelly suffering from TB. It is surely time we worked towards creating a healthy environment, and welcome a renaissance of healthy badgers.”
Ministers say the cull will be carried out in a ‘highly controlled’ manner with 40 areas in England required to submit a bid in competition with each other to be part of the pilot.
“To pit areas against one another is a typical bureaucratic nonsense which only a desk bound civil servant would dream up,” Mr Lovegrove-Fielden said.
“Hopefully Shropshire will be successful, but the earliest a cull could take place would be 2014.”
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Mr Lovegrove-Fielden infers and assumes that badgers are to blame for the losses he describes. He has, of course, no evidence for that belief. He won’t know how many, if any, of his badgers are infected, and will have even less idea whether they are infectious. Cattle-to-cattle transmission of bTB is the fundamental and continuing cause of the disease, thanks in part to ineffffective testing, lax controls over movement (far too many farmers buy in catle from herds with a very suspect history) and the refusal of farmers in general to adopt biosecurity measures recommended (but not enforced) by Defra. He will also be well aware of the frequent breaking of bTB regulations by farmers, including the well publicised ear-tag swapping. The decision to shoot badgers at night is inhumane, potentially dangerous to the public, will certainly lead to perturbation (the phenomenon peculiar to badgers when their social groups are destroyed), and will–as Defra admits–cost farmers more than it will save. Very few badgers are suffering from the disease in the way he suggests and of course it is foolish to suggest that a random non-selective massacre of badgers, which is what is proposed (far more healthy badgers than diseased ones will be killed)will lead to a healthy badger population. Quite the reverse will happen. Research has demonstrated that the prevalence of disease in badgers that survive a cull is HIGHER, not lower.
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On the contrary. Badger and cattle vaccination are expected by Defra to be available and licenced around next year.
Random shooting of badgers, apart from encouraging idiots with guns to go on a random killing spree, is likely to increase the problem, because badger colonies will be disrupted and they will start roaming.
Disaster waiting to happen, but so is this whole government. Nothing new.
I also think there will be a big rise in the illegal cruel sport of Badger baiting, who’s to know what is going on in the countryside.
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