Teen beauty spot drinkers are ramblers, not rebels
- Dave Burrows
Letter: Why protect badgers from necessary cull?
Thursday 12th January 2012, 7:54AM GMT.
You will be aware of the proposed badger cull.
I would like to make you aware of other things about badgers.
But don’t take my word for it. Please go to any livestock market or ask anyone involved with the countryside for many years and ask why are their no curlews, lapwings, very few hedgehogs and wild bees.
I will guarantee you will get this answer: Badgers roam around at night and they eat the eggs and the honey and baby hedgehogs.
We cull deer, rabbits, foxes, moles, rats and mice. Poor old pheasants are born to be shot. What is so special about badgers?
G. Roberts,
Clun
Sponsored Links
UK News
Most Commented
- Leader: Hospital parking suggestion simply nonsense
- Leader: Crimewave goes up with the mercury
- Teen beauty spot drinkers are ramblers, not rebels
- MP Owen Paterson opposed to same-sex marriages
- Parking zones fear for Shropshire hospital workers
- Letter: Who will foot public sector bill?
- Hospital 18-week waiting list down to 800
Shropshire Star on Twitter
Keep updated with the latest breaking news and content on our Twitter feed.
Lifestyle
Interactive Dining Out map
Hundreds of reviews by the Shropshire Star and Express & Star's teams to help you decide where to eat.
LIVE traffic updates
Road, rail and airport - latest
Our new, live traffic and travel updates service - check before you set out.
OUR NEW APP
Get the new Shropshire Star app
Download the Shropshire Star’s new app to your iPad or iPhone to get one week of access to our digital newspapers absolutely FREE.
shropshirestar.com
Popular sections
Useful links
One could therefore argue that the badgers are just doing what badgers do best ….. it’s called natural selection (some local bloke called Darwin wrote about it once …. it’ll never catch on though, that chap sat up in the clouds is too busy getting everyone to kill each other cos they can’t agree on his name …)
More seriously though, I think the isue is that the ‘experts’ still can’t agree if culling is the best way forward – some say vacination is a better option which makes shooting and gassing seem a tad more …. well mediaeval in some ways.
Plus some will tell you that the cows pass the TB to the badgers not the other way round.
I think what I’m really saying is because of the large amount of miss-information on the subject, the greater populus will never support such action ….. plus of course most people think badgers are ‘cute and cuddly’* and we shouldn’t be so horrid to them.
* they are not by the way, ‘cute and cuddly’ when you try and help one hit by a car that some ignorant driver has just left to suffer – they tend to be very big, strong, snarly, angry creatures with big sharp teeth as I once found out !!!
Report abuse
Exactly, when it comes to badgers, it’s not all black and white.
Report abuse
Ha ha very good ….
There is after all that grey area in these things !!!
Report abuse
Is it a new thing that badgers have started eating lapwings eggs and baby hedgehogs? They have been doing it for thousands of years so there must be another reason for the decline as well. I agree that we may need to control badger numbers but we also need to be aware that pesticide use is depriving lapwings and hedgehogs of the insects they eat and continuing to rip out hedgerows is taking away the habitat they live in.
Report abuse
I was originally going to put as my reply …. go to any livestock market or ask anyone involved with the countryside for many years and ask why are their no curlews, lapwings, very few hedgehogs and wild bees.
I will guarantee you will get this answer: “OHH ARRR DUNNO BUT IT AIN’T GONNA BE ME PUMPING ALL THEM PESTICIDES INT’ GROUND TO MEK YER CARROTS CHEAPER AT TESCO …. MUST BE THEM THAT BADGERS SEE, JUS’ LOOK AT ‘EM THERE EYES ARE TOO CLOSE TOGETHER FOR MY LIKING” ….
But you put it so much more elequently :-)
Report abuse
Google found a reply to a similar letter in The Guardian, saying …
“Got to pick you up on that. I’ve been doing survey work for the BTO for over 10 years in an area that used to have an abundant wader population, including Lapwing. They’re still here, but numbers returning to breed each year are fewer and breeding success is also down. There are specific problems at the wintering sites that have nothing to do with badger popualtions, and the decline in breeding success on the summer sites is due largely to habitat loss, climate change, and concomitant changes to invertebrate food supply, which appears to have all but collapsed collapsed in some areas.
One survey area that I cover does still contain healthy wader pops, along with an unusually high concentration of badger setts. It’s an upland area, with numerous small hill farms. Sheep and beef cattle are the predominant livestock. Bovine TB – in either cattle or badgers – is almost non-existent, possibly because the kind of large-scale cattle movements common in the southern UK just don’t happen up here. The research into breeding birds populations is on-going.”
It’s a complex issue, but unfortunately with most problems in nature it usually turns out to be us that’s upset the balance. Regarding wild bees, I suspect the relatively recent habit of cutting countryside verges (the only abundant source of wild flowers) to the ground twice a year doesn’t help them much.
Report abuse
You are of course 100% correct (I detest people who say 150% – what does that really mean ???)
I say we start culling those people who are destroying the wildlife’s habitat, ripping out those hedges and trees, and spraying chemicals on those flowers in the wrong place just because we want to plant cauliflowers !!! Mr Bumble and Mrs Tiggywinkle will certainly thank us ….. as come to think of it will much of the population of Newport
While we’re on the subject of TB … seems that in some areas of the UK the TB bug is reaching almost epidemic proportions .. and it’s not in the cow fields – it’s in heavily populated inner-city areas – maybe we should start culling the people bringing that back into the country – ohh hang on that could be taken as anti-the-infected or something like that … scrub that !!!
Again, more seriously, I think many people need to realise we SHARE this planet with the creatures of the countryside (and I don’t mean Lord Hooray Foxhunter-Wibblesworth) not OWN it ….. man (sorry, and woman, must be PC) is the biggest destroyer of of bio-diversity not some stripely challenged Mustelidae
Report abuse
Hear Hear!!!
The voice of common sense!
Report abuse
And at last someone in these forums who can actually spell ‘Hear, hear’!
Now all we need to do is to get people to spell ‘ridiculous’ correctly…
Report abuse
Well put, Like me an animal lover. Your last paragraph says it all.
Report abuse
Shropman, totally agree. Man thinks he (and she) owns the planet and can cull anything that gets in his (or her) way. 6 Billion people is NOT good for the planet. It won’t matter in a few billion years anyway as the sun will expand and the earth will be no more.
Report abuse
Of course there is no chance that the amount of chemicals and intensive agriculture could possibly be responsible for the decline in biodiversity. Its the same argument that anglers use. How dare otters and cormorants fish where the humans are.
As for protecting badgers well maybe there does need to be a cull but I’m not sure I agree with taking pot shots at free running badgers based on dodgy science and in a very different format from the marginally successful trial is the right way to do it.
Report abuse
I found an excellent PoV expressed in this Blog as to why G Roberts views are blinkered. It is a reply to yesterday’s Shropshire Star article on the same theme:
http://diaryofanecologeek.wordpress.com/
Enunciates the arguments about loss of farmland birds far clearer than I could attempt.
Report abuse
One word ‘Evidence’.
You provide nothing to support this premise. Opinions at a livestock market are entirely subjective, prone to bias and likely to be incredibly inaccurate.
I would also like to point out that there is consensus between the vast majority of scientists that culling badgers is not a long-term solution to bovine TB.
Probably a good idea to get your evidence from scientific studies rather than farmers markets. Don’t believe me? Hit the Google scholar button and take a look at the hundreds of published scientific studies on these subjects.
Report abuse