Claims that culling badgers cuts bovine TB are lies says vet
CLAIMS that the badger cull is helping reduce TB in cattle are “barefaced lies”, an expert said yesterday.
Dr Iain McGill, a vet and director of Prion Interest Group, disputed statements by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs that a cull in Somerset and Gloucestershire was working.
He told the BBC: “The current situation in the cull zone says there is an increased prevalence. Badger culling has not worked. They are issuing barefaced lies in this matter.”
His scathing assessment follows a Defra-commissioned independent review of the bovine TB strategy in which its chairman, Professor Sir Charles Godfray of Oxford University, was asked to quantify the bigger source of the disease spreading – the farming industry or badgers.
He said: “I would say definitely on the cattleto-cattle side.”
Prof Godfray’s review said badger culling can have a “real effect but effect”, reducing TB in 15 per cent.
Currently the anti-TB strategy includes minimum four-year culls in 32 parts of England. Up to 75,000 badgers are likely to have been exterminated by the end of the year since the start of the programme in 2013.
Prof Godfray said: “Wildlife does have a role, but it’s wrong to put all the blame on wildlife and to use this as an excuse to not make hard decisions in industry, which is going to cost the industry money.”
He called for trials of TB vaccines for badgers to gauge if it is a more effective way of halting the disease.
A Defra spokesman dismissed the allegations of lies, saying: “The latest statistics showed reductions in new outbreaks of bovine TB in the initial cull areas.” a modest herds by