Western Morning News (Saturday)
Premature to call time on culling
Routine badger culling appears likely to be phased out the nearer we get to developing a TB vaccine for cattle. But Bridgwater and West Somerset Conservative MP Ian Liddell-Grainger warns Defra Secretary and Redruth and Camborne MP George Eustice in an op
DEAR George, I’ve had time to talk over with some of the local farmers your latest thoughts on how we tackle bovine TB and I must admit there is a certain degree of nervousness that we might be lifting our foot from the pedal before we have reached our destination.
For all the tumult and shouting there was when we started culling badgers hereabouts, the operation has gone reasonably smoothly since the antis concluded they weren’t going to halt it and went off looking for something else to demonstrate about.
And as your figures show it had been remarkably effective in bringing down the incidence of the disease. I find it hard to describe in a few words the degree of relief that has overtaken the farming community at the fact that while we may have not eradicated bTB locally we have at least restricted it to manageable proportions.
I entirely take your point that it was never intended that culling would be the only weapon to employ in the fight against this dreadful epidemic and I would follow that up by assuring you that the last thing any farmer wants is to see every last badger exterminated.
But to start drawing up proposals to suspend existing licences and not to issue any more is in my view a very premature course to follow right now.
While we have targeted the TB hotspots in the South West and the Midlands we are a long way from being ahead of the game and since TB spreads like wildfire we cannot say with any certainty that we have halted it in its tracks and prevented it spreading to other areas.
That’s why I believe culling should always be held in reserve as a blunt instrument to be called on if cases are suddenly found to be flaring in a certain locality. Experience has shown that early intervention is the only effective way to slow the spread of bTB – and that sitting back and doing nothing (as Labour did for more than a decade) is a surefire way of plunging us all back into a fullblown crisis.
Of course, cattle vaccination offers the perfect solution to all this and I appreciate you informing me that we should be able to start rolling the vaccine out within five years. But I have lost count of the number of times we have been told we shall have a usable vaccine within five years.
The other measures – better biosecurity (again!) and ‘rewarding low risk cattle purchasing behaviour’ (explanation, please) – are all very well but the fundamental problem is that while we continue to have thousands of healthy cattle exposed to a deadly risk from badgers, we cannot afford to be recklessly optimistic about the effectiveness of an as yet untested vaccine merely in the interest of appeasing the misguided and misinformed badger-huggers.