We’re killing the scapegoat

With your permission, I am going to hit you with some statistics. I don’t really do numbers. I did get my O-level arithmetic but it was so long ago The Beatles hadn’t split up yet. I wisely chose a line of work where I could mostly get by with words. But this is a story at least partly about numbers.

The British Government has just trotted out its plans for killing more badgers than ever this autumn in a forlorn attempt to eradicate bovine TB in cattle. They do not make for pretty reading.

This autumn, there will be 21 badger culls in place. The target figures (and wouldn’t you love to inspect the workings of the particular civil service mind that came up with these numbers) are a minimum of 21,797 and a maximum of 33,347.

Yes, that does mean shooting dead 33,347 badgers. The “cull zone” with the biggest target is in Dorset. That target is a maximum of 7,000.

Yet last year’s total for the whole country was 10,000 badgers killed so it is pretty clear that “the greenest government ever” is persuaded that tripling the number of badgers killed is a good idea and a positive step in its efforts to contain the disease.

There are two problems with that conclusion. One is that science disagrees with it and after three years of culling, bovine TB in the first “cull zones” (they really must come up with a better name than that) is still no lower than it is in what, I suppose, we must call the un-culled zones.

The other problem is the cost. It works out at £6,800 per badger killed. If you are more mathematically accomplished than I am, you can do the 6,800 x 33,347 long multiplication in your head and tell me what it is, and then we can both reach a decision about whether or not we think it’s good value for money, and whether or not the cause represents a good use of public money.

Meanwhile, it still cost £100 million last year to kill 29,000 cattle. So it is quite possible that this year the government will have killed more badgers than cattle, and England will still have bovine TB.

And the farming industry will still be shuttling cattle all over the country – which is the single most important factor in the spread of the disease – and it is well known that disruption of badger populations prompts many of them to travel to new areas, and if you believe that badgers do spread the disease, then there’s another good way of increasing the affected area.

All this is being watched nervously in Scotland, both by farmers and by people who think killing badgers as a means of controlling a disease of cattle is truly grotesque, and that amounts to a lot of people – and some of them are also farmers.

Scotland is officially bovine TB-free. But earlier this year a small herd of infected cattle had to be destroyed on Skye. Also, a suspect badger was apparently found during tests in Cumbria, just over the Border.

The official cull zones in England are also moving north – as far as Cheshire this year, and there were dark mutterings by sundry doom-mongers about a threat to Scotland’s bovine TB-free status in the long term.

It further transpires that being officially bovine TB-free does not necessarily mean there are no cases of the disease. They are very few and far between and so far they all involve new herds where cattle have been imported into Scotland from infected areas. The moral of that particular story should not need to be explained to anyone.

But there is another factor. There is no difference whatsoever between the badger in England and the badger in Scotland, and they do not stop at the Border. Wildlife does not understand the concept of borders, and badgers, like almost every other species in the north of England and the south of Scotland, will routinely cross the Border every day, probably many times.

Yet Scotland is bovine-TB free. I would like to think that in the event of a serious outbreak of bovine TB here in years to come, the Scottish Government would be more attentive to the appropriate science and not resort to killing badgers.

In the meantime, a much more rigid control of cattle movements throughout Britain, and a much more widespread campaign of cattle vaccination should be the British Government’s top priority. Any rational observer of the situation must wonder why it was not the first priority but, as is so often the case when some aspect of country life starts to cause problems for people, the first priority seems to be to look around for something else to blame.

Almost always, the scapegoat will be nature, when almost always, the solution is as plain as a face in the mirror.

“The British Government has just trotted out its plans for killing more badgers than ever...

Picture: PA. The cull means £6,800 is spent for every badger killed.