Are changes enough to save iconic badger?

NOW is an important time when government announcements should be clear, simple and accurate so they can be trusted. I think this government is deliberately misleading the population with cleverly worded statements over the badger cull, nuclear power and fox hunting, what else?

Last year the government made a deliberately misleading headline announcement that the badger cull was to be gradually phased out. In reality on the ground the cull was increased to include new zones in a linked up area from the Lake District to Cornwall. Many more thousands of badgers were killed including in the new Somerset killing zone, I believe, from Sparkford to Ilminster to Taunton to the Polden Hills, a huge area managed by a new cull company NLND. That means virtually the whole of Somerset is now killing badgers. Not the general public’s understanding of phasing it out!

This year’s misleading announcement to the media, “plans to stop issuing four-year licences to intensively cull badgers in new areas of England” . There are no new areas that they can justify culling in, they have covered sufficient land mass to achieve their ends of killing a species down to numbers that will eventually put the badger on the danger list. If you were allowed to visit the West Somerset original zone you would see badger setts grown over with no remaining animals, even though they are supposed to leave a 30% population at the sett after culling – where is the auditing of this? Where is the police enforcement of the cull directors, that the taxpayer pays millions of pounds during culling? The government said it plans to support badger vaccination in areas that have completed culls, so is this another way of saying they are not vaccinating? Will they find enough animals left after 9 or 10 years of culling to make the vaccination program viable in West Somerset?

The beginning of the end of the cull actually means in reality it is continuing year-on-year for the duration of this government. BTB continues in cattle and will do, regardless of the presence of badgers.

Cattle will continue to host the disease so long as cows are intensely bred, kept captive in overcrowded sheds, fed monoculture feeds, subjected to antibiotic abuse, transported all over the country, mixing with other herds, and are not vaccinated. People are making choices to not buy dairy which hopefully will impact on the industry but will this be in sufficient time to save the iconic badger?

Jo Smoldon Bridgwater