Badger cull is postponed until next summer

10:16am Tuesday 23rd October 2012 in News Sarah Hickinbotham By Sarah Davies

Badger cull may get the chop Badger cull may get the chop

A CONTROVERSIAL pilot scheme to cull badgers in a bid to stop the spread of tuberculosis in cattle has today been shelved.

In a statement to Parliament, Environment Secretary Owen Paterson confirmed the trial in the south west of England is to be postponed until next summer.

He said a number of factors had led to the decision to delay the cull, including bad weather over the summer, protracted legal proceedings and new research which has revealed higher than expected badger numbers in the pilot areas.

However, Mr Paterson said he was committed to the cull going ahead.

As we previously reported, a proposed test area for a six-week trial encompassed parts of the districts of Wychavon and the Malvern Hills, as well as the Forest of Dean and Tewkesbury.

Another test area was set to be targeted near Taunton in Somerset.

The scheme would have seen the shooting of badgers as part of efforts to tackle TB in cattle.

Farmers say the cull is necessary to tackle tuberculosis in cattle, but the plans have been strongly opposed by wildlife campaigners.

Comments(8)

the eve news says...
10:27am Tue 23 Oct 12

GOOD I do hope this is the case, surely we are able to vaccinate against TB in cattle nowadays or is it to much of an expensive way !!!

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Grumbleweed Connection says...
11:00am Tue 23 Oct 12

Had anyone in the government read the scientific papers published by Lord Krebs after the last trial cull, the current situation would not have transpired. I would like to think that any decision announced today is the result of consideration of scientific evidence. Unfortunately it will have been based on economics. Postponement will be the most likely outcome, but cancellation would be far more desirable. Yet another Tory U-turn, after they have made a very poor attempt at doing their homework.

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Arthur Blenkinsop says...
11:34am Tue 23 Oct 12

Good. I was on a farm in Worcestershire yesterday - even farmers don't want this cull. It would not achieve anything except bad feeling, it is not the answer.

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Wordswardle says...
1:37pm Tue 23 Oct 12

Farmers' reaction to almost everything is 'kill it' - foxes, deer, pigeons, wild boar and now badgers. This latter is a diversion from their own appalling failures. 25,000 cattle were killed last year because of bTB (a reduction from 40,000 two yeasr ago) whilst 250,000 cattle were killed because of poor stockmanship - mastities, laminitis and infertility. The truth is that constantly increasing output has pushed the immune systems of dairy cattle beyond their ability to cope. Why else would most dairy cows be slaughtered at five or six years old? Now maybe they can concentrate on their appalling biosecurity where almost no one uses foot baths at livestock markets, TB tests that fail 30 per cent of the time. leaving infected cattle with the herd, and mass cattle movements across the coutry. Better still, give up dairy!

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Arthur Blenkinsop says...
2:21pm Tue 23 Oct 12

Wordswardle - i think your are totally wrong, in fact i know you are totally wrong, in your assumption that farmers' reaction to everything is 'kill it'. I spend a lot of time on farms, and by and large, farmers now are more conservation minded than ever before. Generally it doesn't do them, the countryside - which is where their living comes from - or the wildlife any good whatsoever to kill everything in sight. You will find that a good proportion of farmers now don't even bother to own a gun for pest control.
There is most definitely a problem with bovine TB and the idea is to try to find out how it is spreading so rapidly around certain parts of the country. And i think that you will find that even the majority of dairy farmers are not convinced that killing large numbers of badgers will do any good at all to alleviate the problem.

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Olga says...
9:31pm Tue 23 Oct 12

Why should infected Badgers be exempt from a cull instead of cattle? Personally I am against the Badger cull in its expected form as it is not discriminatory - healthy Badgers will be shot as well as infected ones, and there doesn't appear to be any way of protecting the healthy ones from being shot. Surely it is possible to test sets or sample Badgers from sets and then gas and collapse that set - if the samples are healthy let them be covered by the pretty strict guidlines that protect them at present.
Comments like "Give Up Dairy" are unhelpful - what's the proposition - to make the comsumption of dairy products illegal? And we haven't spoken of Beef yet! Apart from many other problems we would then have a countryside without any managed cattle and a huge population of very poorly Badgers which we can neither look after or eat.
Large scale interference with nature is asking for trouble, and that includes a balance being altered by over protection.
Massive efforts are being made to produce effective and identifiable TB vaccines and one day they will be available, until then we have to control this the best we can - I really don't believe that shooting a low level and an unknown proportion of wildlife is the right answer. Especially as we won't know at the time the trigger is pulled if the animal is healthy or not.

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Jabbadad says...
11:45am Wed 24 Oct 12

It's quiet simple really save the Badgers to go about spreading TB which if ever it is linked to Humans will be catastrophic, and please the Save The Badger Brigade who have nothing better to do, or to Kill thousands of Cattle, which will affect our dairy industry, and our milk supplies which then may have to be imported.
Like has been previously said the authorities can track / trace farm animals from birth to death no matter where they travel in the UK so surely they can produce sound evidence as to where the TB is and then to eradicate those Badgers if they are the carriers of the infection. We can be both civilised and efficient about this.

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New Kid on the Block says...
4:35pm Wed 24 Oct 12

Until it is possible to vaccinate Badgers there will be no satisfactory answer.
Even if Cattle were to be vaccinated at birth there would still be a reservoir of infection.
The only available vaccine needs to be given by injection and is not very effective in Badgers.
Any firm that can create a better TB vaccine stands to earn the gratitude of a lot of people and no doubt a considerable sum of money.
In reply to Olga, killing badgers by gassing them causes far more suffering than shooting. I don't know of any way you could collapse a badger sett without producing massive upheaval to the area.

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