Badger culling

[bosephus]

Hi guys, I have been busy recently investigating the pros and cons of this proposed badger cull. Trying desperately to be unbiased. What do you think?

[saint-spoon]

I have looked into this quite a lot and as far as I can see there are very few experts who see culling badgers as a positive way to prevent Bovine tuberculosis. It seems that if you destroy a population of badgers in an area then the neighbouring badger populations will migrate into the newly vacated territory which can cause, counter-productively, infected animals to spread the disease into areas previously occupied by healthy animals. From what I have read the pressure to cull badgers is a political rather than scientific decision; there was quite a big smear campaign by the then government before the last election; plenty of scare mongering about the opposition (now in power) forcing the cull and legalising hunting with dogs. The cull was planned by the last government to appease some sections of the farming community who see the cull as the only way to prevent bovine TB. Unfortunately when politics comes into it votes are the over riding concern not science and we seem to be increasingly embroiled in MORI POLLitics where spin is king.
So in short I am not in favour because I believe that after much consideration, culling will be counter-productive and won’t actually solve the problem. Large scale vaccination of badger colonies however may well be effective in the long run.

[Mo]

You can understand the frustration of farmers when the herd is infected and their livelihood threatened. Just like the rage of hen keepers visited by the fox.

But the gut reaction of revenge may not always solve the problem, however human it is.

[wendy]

I also can't understand why they cannot vaccinate against such things and foot and mouth.
They are more than willing to shove vaccines here, there and everywhere for children and pet animals.

[saint-spoon]

You can understand the frustration of farmers when the herd is infected and their livelihood threatened. Just like the rage of hen keepers visited by the fox.

But the gut reaction of revenge may not always solve the problem, however human it is.

Oh I whole heartedly agree Mo, If your herd is destroyed because of TB then the knee jerk reaction is to blame someone or something; unfortunately from what I have read it appears that badger culling has never actually prevented cattle from becoming infected; on the contrary it has in some case encouraged infected animals to migrate into new previously TB free areas spreading the disease. The subject appears quite regularly in publications such as BBC wildlife magazine and the debate continues; I would however suggest that if there was any indications that culling worked then there would be at least some positive feedback. I do not recall any professional bodies waxing lyrical about the benefits of culling, even government organisations such as DEFRA seem to be against it and the veterinary professional bodies all seem to be firmly against the cull. Unfortunately political pressure seems to always win out. I am quite firmly in favour of the vaccination option which will be slower and may not work but it has got to be better than continuing with a culling programme that has been shown to have a negative effect. Culling is cheaper than vaccinations and easier to achieve.

[bosephus]

I just found out that studies showed that in areas where badgers were culled, fox numbers increased by 92%.

interesting stat

[Fellsider]

I'm with Wendy in not fully understanding why an inoculation programme hasn't been attempted properly. I understand that inoculation of cattle would make it difficult to identify BTB carriers, but surely if all animals are routinely inoculated carriers would eventually be eliminated?

I think, but might be wrong, the same anti inoculation argument is used for both TB and foot and mouth; if we inoculate in the UK it restricts and/or affects prices that UK livestock will fetch overseas, either as livestock or carcases. But surely that is only ever going to be a short term loss until the diseases are wiped out?

[Stef]

So far all the evidence is that the restricted cull being mooted is not big enough to have any desired affect (about 12%) so the cull cannot achieve its aims.

Add that to the measured effects in the random cull trial, increased instances of cattle with tb, and you have 2 reasons not to go ahead with the plan.

A colleague's husband is a badger scientist - he works for the government and the basis of his job is to record and measure the effects of badgers on the environment and vice versa. He wrote his report on the random cull which was fed into the final report on the trial, and said quite clearly that it would have the opposite effect to that intended. Many others like him did much the same. Apparently you would have to kill or vaccinate more than 50% of the badger population to have any positive effect - or so the modelling thingy suggests!

Yet the cull will probably go ahead!

Vaccination is not fully possible, tb is bacterial and about £30 million into research there is still no effective vaccine. As in humans BCG reduces infection rate and levels of symptoms and only has about 60% success rate. Also there is a EU prohibition on vaccinating cattle against tb it's not likely to be used. The reason for this is that it is impossible to tell the difference between an infected and a vaccinated cow! But there is a lot of research into this aspect so you never know...

[Stef]

Sorry fellsider, I missed your post.

Bovine tb can be transmitted to humans, so no-one is going to sell meat that has tb.

Cross infection is highly unlikely, abbatoirs cut out the lesions and the rest of the meat is OK - but can you imagine that as a government policy?