Badgers shot dead and News corpses stored near beauty spot
IMAGES have emerged showing badger corpses being stored in a barn near a Derbyshire tourist spot.
The images from hidden cameras show bagged carcasses arriving at the makeshift mortuary before being taken for incineration, reports the Derby Telegraph’s sister paper, the Daily Mirror.
Protest group Derbyshire Against the Cull placed cameras in the barn in the Peak District, a few miles from Bakewell. Campaigners say vans arrive at all times with dead badgers to be stored in plastic barrels.
Badger Trust chief Dominic Dyer said: “These images lift the lid on the brutal reality of the cull, which is taking place across 11 counties of England stretching from Cornwall to Cumbria, in the biggest destruction of a protected species ever seen in Britain.
“Boris Johnson intervened to stop culling in Derbyshire last year, but as he proudly boasts of protecting more habitats and species in Britain at a global UN summit, the reality is his government are now pushing badgers to the verge of local extinction in areas of England which they have inhabited since the Ice Age.
“By November over 165,000 badgers could have been slaughtered in England as a result of the cull policy since 2013, at an estimated public cost of over £70 million.
“Badger cull contractors are not being independently monitored for public safety or animal welfare and these images from Derbyshire show cull contractors clearly breaching important public health rules.
“The barn where badgers are being left has open windows which could easily be accessed by foxes who could get access to the carcasses. It is also situated in a sheep field in contravention of hazardous waste rules, which state storage must take place away from livestock.”
Mr Dyer argued that some of the dead badgers being dumped in the barn could have previously been vaccinated by the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust, under a publicly funded badger vaccination programme.
He said: “The vast majority of the badgers killed in the cull policy are not being tested for TB and over 90% are likely to be free of the disease.
“The Government could kill every badger in England, but bovine TB will remain in cattle herds due to unreliable TB cattle testing, bio security and cattle movement controls.”
More than 100,000 badgers have been culled since 2013 and the scheme was widened last month and included Derbyshire.
Environment Secretary George Eustice said: “Bovine TB is one of the most difficult and intractable animal health challenges that the UK faces today, causing considerable trauma for farmers and costing taxpayers over £100 million every year.
“No one wants to continue the cull of a protected species indefinitely.
“That is why we are accelerating other elements of our strategy, including vaccination and improved testing so that we can eradicate this insidious disease and start to phase out badger culling in England.”