Shropshire Star

Letter: No justification for the continued culling of badgers or other wildlife

Mr Cartwright of the NFU is wrong, no doubt unwittingly, but in doing so, he fails his members, few of whom can afford it.

Published

The best available science now and in 2011 is that culling badgers is not going to make any meaningful contribution to reducing the incidence of bovine TB in cattle.

Indeed, the statutory advice to Defra was and continues to make plain that killing every badger in the UK would only trim disease incidence rates by 16 per cent “at best”.

That, as the NFU knows, is because the reservoir is UK livestock - including but not confined to cattle.

The NFU does not publicly support - much less call for - the bio-security measures the best available evidence spells out as necessary - e.g. mandatory testing of non bovine livestock, clean mounted troughs, separate ingress and egress for infected and clean cattle, housing cattle in family groups, banning transportation of slurry and manure from and to affected farms, banning co-grazing of tested cattle with untested livestock, mandatory use of the more effective assay test instead of relying on the old skin test which on average is just 85 per cent reliable, whole herd culling when a reactor is detected.

At the very least they’d advocate use of the more reliable cattle test.

If the NFU truly wanted to make any difference to bovine TB, they would follow the evidence and advice members accordingly.

So either they don’t want to, or they are woefully bad at communicating.

Alternatively maybe they don’t care because they know what a tiny proportion of UK cattle is affected per year - it’s less than 0.5 per cent in all.

Kill every single wild animal known to be capable of carrying the disease, and after nine years, the proportion of cattle affected by bovine TB would still be 0.4 per cent.

It’s high time we scrapped tax funded compensation for bovine TB with a farmer funded insurance scheme, run by farmers, payouts dependent on bio-security levels.

More than 91 per cent of all bovine TB cases arise from cattle to cattle infection, so there is simply no justification for continued culling of badgers or other wildlife, they are not the problem.

Farming desperately needs to clean up its act - but why should it while its own trades union fails to give members all the information, let alone advocates “all the options”?

Rosie Wood, Bishop's Castle