Badgers To Be Culled
By Mark Steer
The UK's chief scientist Sir David King has said that the only way to control the spread of TB from badgers to cattle is to cull badgers.This makes me angry. Angry and frustrated.
Has Sir David based this decision on any hard science? No. Has he based his decision on the potential economic losses due to TB? No. Has he based his decision on being the government's puppet? You betcha.
In June, an independent group of scientists, the ISG, published their conclusions on ten years' worth of study into the problem of badgers spreading TB to cattle. They concluded that "no practicable method of badger culling can reduce the incidence of cattle TB to any meaningful extent, and several culling approaches may make matters worse".
That's right - the big report by the people who were studying the problem for years and years says culling doesn't work. The same conclusions have also been made by other scientists who've studied the problem including groups from the Universities of Oxford, Bristol and even California.And yet somehow, David King has managed to bypass all this information and produces his own report with little extra information which says that the best thing the government can do is start culling.
So why has King, a chemist by training, decided to completely overturned the findings of the ISG? It saddens me to say, but I can only assume that he has been pressured into it by government officials who don't want to upset farmers by putting into place schemes which mean them having to make alterations to their practices.
Previous studies have suggested that simple measures such as stopping livestock getting within a metre or so away from hedgerows and adapting feeding troughs so that badgers can't get in them for an easy meal, could significantly reduce the incidence of TB in cattle. Shouldn't we be trying these first instead of embarking on a course of action that has been shown - proved - to increase the transmission of TB amongst badgers and cattle? The cost of culling will soar into the millions. The money could be better spent subsidising changes to farms instead that might actually make a long term difference.
Why culling won't work
There are two basic ways you can go with culling - control or eradication. Virtually all studies that have looked at badger culling have shown that just controlling the numbers of badgers can increase the transmission of TB. Why? In areas where badgers are being culled, the surviving badgers get a little stressed. Stressed badgers contract TB and become infectious much more readily than chilled out badgers. They also move further afield through the territories of other badger families. This makes it more likely that they will get into a ruck with the locals and, you guessed it, pass on TB to other badgers. So that's controlling badgers, in the words of the ISG "uneconomic", in the words of Mark Steer, "a complete waste of time".That leaves us with eradication. What exactly does that mean? Eradication from an area maybe - the South West of England is worst affected by TB, so maybe we should be trying for 100% annihilation of the badgers of Bodmin.
This won't work. It'll be extremely expensive, and even if we do manage total eradication it won't be long before badgers start to recolonise. Are we going to have a permanent possie of trained killers on standby to repel badgers at the borders? Probably not.
So that leaves us with having to eradicate badgers from the entire UK. It's not impossible. It's only been about 300 years since we last drove a large mammal over the edge and we've got much better equipment these days. However, there is no way in this world that the nature-loving public, NGOs and institutions will allow the whole scale elimination of badgers and, to be fair, no one is seriously contemplating this possibility.
So there we have it. David King, a man I used to think was a half decent human being, seems to have cheapened himself by pandering to a governmental gallery of idiots and wimps. And we wonder why science gets a bad press.
Rant over.
Do you want to get something off your chest? We want to hear from you.
These people did:
Rant about veg - Vegans will save us
Rant about aliens - The truth is out there
Rant about hospitals - The bugs will kill us
Rant about sex - Gender wars part I
Image: National Park Service/W
Share this
