Has the new Labour administration called time on badger culling? It’s not entirely clear, and wildlife experts are divided on the new course of action being proposed.
Minister for food security and rural affairs Daniel Zeichner has announced that badger culling, which has been going on for more than a decade in an effort to reduce rates of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in cattle, would cease within five years.
A key component of the new strategy was the promise to establish a new “Badger Vaccinator Field Force” in an attempt to drive down the incidence of the disease in badgers. Many scientists believe badgers are instrumental in passing it to cattle – hence why there has been a culling programme in place since 2013.
ZSL, one of the UK’s leading wildlife research organisations, described itself as “delighted” with the news that culling was to end.
A study by one of its senior research fellows, Prof Rosie Woodroffe, has found that the percentage of badgers testing positive for bovine tuberculosis (bTB) dropped from 16% to 0% following vaccination.
But what if badgers do not regularly pass TB to cattle? That’s the view of the independent ecologist Tom Langton, who has authored several papers on the the impact of culling on rates of bTB in cattle. If that’s the case, vaccinating them is pointless.
“No one has ever shown that vaccinating badgers stops TB in cattle,” says Langton. “It’s just a theory.” The largest badger vaccination effort carried out in the UK was in Pembrokeshire, where some 5,300 badgers were immunised against bTB at a cost of £1.6m, but Langton says it’s not clear if it had a positive impact.
There’s no detail in the Government’s announcement on how and when the vaccination field force will be set up. Vaccinating tens of thousands of badgers a year could be hugely costly, and there is little to suggest that the policy has the backing of farmers.
The biggest farming union, the NFU, has consistently supported the previous Government’s culling strategy, which has killed an estimated 230,000 badgers. It pointed to studies that have demonstrated the effectiveness of culling in reducing bTB in cattle.
“It is absolutely vital that this new strategy draws on all methods to control this devastating disease, especially where peer reviewed science has demonstrated benefits,” says NFU president Tom Bradshaw.
But other peer-reviewed science has shown culling to have no benefit at all. Farmers are making some headway in tackling bTB, but it can be entirely explained by more rigorous cattle-based measures, some scientists argue.
All round, efforts to tackle bTB cost the Government more than £100 million every year or more than £1 billion in the past decade. This isn’t the first time that the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has promised to tackle the disease once and for all – but to date, most new strategies have failed to significantly shift the dial.
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