Do they want to prolong badgers’ agony?
It might seem strange to suggest that animal rights campaigners appear to be happy to allow countless thousands of wild animals to die a long and very painful death. But that is the implication of a very odd story emerging from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), where a fierce internal battle is raging over a scientific breakthrough that could also save Britain billions of pounds.
Since, 25 years ago, it became illegal to kill badgers, a double-tragedy has been quietly spreading over an ever larger area of Britain’s countryside. Not only have their numbers exploded, causing more and more of them to become infected with deadly TB; but this has spread to cattle, causing hundreds of thousands to be culled, most perfectly healthy, at a cost to taxpayers estimated to have already totalled nearly £2 billion.
The recent “pilot culls” of badgers in Somerset have been far more successful than is generally acknowledged. Local farmers report that nearly 100 herds long infected have been reported “clear” for the first time in years. The one remaining objection to culling is that far too many healthy badgers are also being shot, because there is no effective way to distinguish them from those infected.
But at last a team from Warwick University has come up with a cheap DNA analysis – the so-called PCR test – which exhaustive trials, ordered by the former environment secretary Owen Paterson, have now shown to be up to 97.6 per cent effective in identifying, from excreta, which badger setts are infected.
In fact, both national and international law make it a legal obligation to kill TB-infected animals, and here in this test it seems is the long-hoped-for holy grail, which could solve the whole dreadful crisis. But as Farmers
Guardian reports, under the headline “Defra urged to embrace PCR to refine badger culling policy”, the ministry still “appears to be unwilling” to use the test.
The truth is, I learn on very good authority, that a battle is raging, with officials still too much under the influence of the animal rights lobby, who are stopping further research needed to perfect the test. If they win, it would be a scandal not only to those thousands of cattle farmers for whom TB has been an appalling tragedy. Already this disaster has cost taxpayers billions; and Brussels warns that the uniquely high incidence of TB in Britain’s cattle could slam the door on all our dairy exports, worth billions more.
Furthermore, PCR could save tens of thousands of sick badgers from that lingering death to which the opposition of the animal rights lobby and those Defra officials now seems to be quite unnecessarily condemning them.