Adopt Labour’s cull-ban plans

OH what a tangled web MAFF vets and Lord Zuckerman wove when they rather improbably first blamed badgers as the main cause of the spread of cattle TB in the mid-1970s.

It was realised even from the start that it was unlikely that badgers can give cows a respiratory bronchopneumonia.

And eight major badger-cattle contact monitoring studies have since found that badgers avoid cows at pasture, in farmyards, and barns, so it simply isn’t happening.

The “scientific evidence” of a link has been that TB badgers have been catching TB from cows ever since. It has been assumed that there has been a Woodchester Park-style “self-sustaining reservoir of TB” supposedly generating the scatter of new unconfirmed breakdowns. Although since these are “new” by definition there is no background TB in either cattle or badgers.

So they have embarrassingly been due to bought-in newly-infected unconfirmed reactors from the last breakdown after all.

Labour’s new Animal Welfare manifesto (www.fwi.co.uk/labourmanifesto) of August 28 promises 15 farming animal welfare changes, including scrapping widespread indiscriminate badger culls as “ineffective and inhumane”, which has been policy in Wales since the 2009 Court case.

Farmers have been predictably been outraged. Since they claim that both the Godfray RBCT cull , and the four APHA pilot cull studies prove that culls “seem to work”.

However, they are a very clever optical delusion.

Plotting changes in cattle TB versus annual badger culls, seemed to have halved TB in the Glos and Somerset pilot culls, 10.4 to 5.6, and 12 to 6 new incidents.

Carefully overlooking the fact that there were only 3,656 badgers culled over four years, only c. 400 with

TB, and less than a dozen so-called super-excretors, from 300 sq. km.

The graph is plotted against annual cattle testing , so faithfully records the effectiveness of cattle controls. Absolutely nothing to do with culling a tiny number of dead-end spillover TB badgers whatsoever.

So why won’t Theresa Villiers and Tony Juniper of natural England , follow Labour and scrap, costly, and utterly meaningless culls ?

Martin Hancox Stroud, Glos