Badgers and bTB

Your feature, in which I am quoted, is fuzzy on the role of badgers in relation to bovine TB (bTB). Perturbation of badger populations when disturbed is well established and not contested. But perturbation effect hypothesis of badgers spreading bTB rapidly to cows is disputed, and hangs on the selective Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT) decisions that are under scrutiny.

Whatever ZSL’s secret project is, it cannot help the RBCT unravelling in hindsight, as science sometimes does. In addition to overlooking nonvisible lesion reactors, the RBCT has other problems on how it treated raw data. Contrary to Rosie Woodroffe’s claims, hardly anyone thinks badgers could never pass bTB to cattle in the field, but that is not the point. It is whether it occurs regularly enough for mass killing of them to be of any disease reduction value. That is what the RBCT set out to test. Tom Langton, via email