Badger vaccination scheme launched for Shropshire

Members say they want to prove that vaccination is the way forward to tackle the problem of bovine tuberculosis.

Following the announcement by Environment Secretary and North Shropshire MP Owen Paterson that there is to be no extension of badger culling this year, the Shropshire Badger Group said it wanted to reaffirm its support for vaccination as a very effective method of dealing with bovine TB within the mammal's population.

To help prove how effective it could be, the group has pledged to offer a four-year vaccination scheme to the first six farmers in Shropshire who contact the group.

And it said its volunteers would do preparatory work for any further farmers completely free of charge with just the vaccinations themselves to pay for.

Plans to roll out the pilot culls of badgers carried out by Defra last year were delayed after not enough badgers were culled during the allotted time.

Mr Jim Ashley, chairman of the Shropshire Badger Group, said that all the surveys carried out showed that the level of disease in the badger population was actually quite low.

He said: "Vaccination is a highly successful and proven method of dealing with disease in both animal and human populations and we have every confidence in the extensive trials of the BCG vaccine at the Government Research Station in Gloucestershire as well as gathering the experience from the Welsh Vaccination Project, and from our own and Shropshire Wildlife Trust's involvement in vaccination projects within Shropshire.

"We are well aware that bovine TB is a very difficult problem within the farming industry and so as a gesture of our desire to help and support farmers in dealing with this problem, we intend to demonstrate our confidence in badger vaccination by offering full four-year vaccination schemes to the first six Shropshire farmers to contact us - totally free of charge.

"For any applications beyond the first six, we will provide all the preparatory work without charge and, if we can find further funding, then we will continue with the totally free schemes," he said.

Mr Ashley said the badger group had carried out a vaccination programme at Middle Knuck Farm in South Shropshire for the last four years and said that the farm was TB free.

Any farmer interested can contact Shropshire Badger Group on www.shropshirebadgergroup.co.uk or the answerphone on (01743) 271999.

Thousands of cattle are slaughtered every year - 30,000 in 2010 because of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) – an airborne respiratory disease. This cost the taxpayer £100 million in 2010.

Bovine TB was almost eradicated by 1970, when there were only about 1,000 cases. But the end of annual cattle testing in the mid-80s, and the devastating effects of BSE and foot-and-mouth disease, when testing was abandoned altogether, meant that many farms lost thousands of animals, and afterward there was a rush to restock. Regulations were relaxed, and bovine tuberculosis returned.

The number of new cases is doubling every nine years and in the last decade over 314,000 otherwise healthy cattle were slaughtered across Great Britain. In 2013, 32,620 cattle were slaughtered, an average of 90 a day.

In 2010, the coalition government announced a public consultation on whether we should have a cull. Of those who responded, 69 per cent were against a cull and 31 per cent were in favour of culling, but alongside vaccination.

The actual vaccination on one farm will take two nights. Badgers are lured to a spot over a number of days with peanuts, cages are introduced and the peanuts put in the cages. On the vaccination nights the licensed vaccinators set the traps, returning at dawn to vaccinate the trapped animals then release them.

Only about 50 per cent of the badgers on a farm need to be vaccinated to ensure a 'herd vaccination' works.

North Shropshire MP Owen Paterson said that eradication programmes from New Zealand to Ireland of TB carrying wildlife have worked.