Badger cull condemned by Shropshire Badger Group
Shropshire Badger Group says that about 70 per cent of the county's badgers have been killed in the cull that started in the autumn.
Government figures have revealed that 3,580 badgers were shot in Shropshire during the cull.
But the badger group says that the figure will be nearer 4,000 when parts of north and east Shropshire – in what is referred to as the Staffordshire zone – are added.
It says there is clear evidence that very few badgers carry bovine TB and in almost all cases of cattle infection the animals have caught it from other cattle.
Jim Ashley, chairman of Shropshire Badger Group, said he believed that English farmers had been failed by the Government’s handling of bovine TB because of its insistence on using the 70-year-old SICCT skin test, introduced just after World War Two as a screening test for farmers who wished to sell safe milk from the farm gate.
"The test is notoriously inaccurate, sometimes no better than 50 per cent reliable, but that means that farmers unnecessarily lose more healthy cattle because infected animals are hidden, silently spreading the disease through their own and neighbours’ herds," he said.
"Vets are not allowed to routinely use the better blood testing methods such as Gamma Interferon and more recently Actiphage both of which provide much more specific and accurate results. Instead, our farmers still have to rely on a test that was launched at about the same time as the Spitfire went into service and look where ‘flight’ has gone since then."
Slow
Mr Ashley said the situation had been made worse by the Government’s painfully slow development of a cattle vaccine.
"Trials of the vaccine have only just begun despite it being in development and promised on and off for the past 20 years."
Sharon Davies-Culham, Shropshire Badger Vaccination Project co-ordinator, said: “We are horrified and sickened by the numbers of badgers killed in Shropshire under this expensive, discredited policy. We have been working successfully with independently minded farmers and landowners across the county to vaccinate badgers against bovine TB.
"This approach is cheaper and more effective than culling, conferring immunity on unborn cubs. Our service has been available free or at cost, using trained and dedicated volunteers committed to help farmers fight this awful disease. Other counties run similar schemes, with several directly funded by Defra. So given there is an alternative, we fail to see why culling is necessary at all in Shropshire.”
