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BADGER UPDATE: Pilot culls set to go ahead (!!)

By Henricus Peters on | 1 Comment

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Bad news for badgers! Two pilot badger culls will go ahead this summer, in Gloucestershire and Somerset, the environment secretary Owen Patterson has announced. The Guardian reports

 

A third area in Dorset is also being prepared for a possible cull, should there be problems with either of the first two. Farmers conducting the cull will have to agree to kill at least 70% of the badger population in the affected areas.

 

The pilot culls, in west Gloucestershire and west Somerset, were postponed amid fears they could not be carried out effectively in autumn last year.

 

Paterson, told the National Farmers’ Union conference in Birminghamthat bovine tuberculosis was “the biggest challenge facing us at the moment”. He said the disease – which led to the slaughter of 26,000 cattle in 2011 – had cost the taxpayer £500m in the last 10 years, and that this could rise to £1bn in the next decade if the disease went unchecked.

 

He said: “Bovine TB is spreading at an alarming rate and causing real devastation to our beef and dairy industry. The authorisation letters issued today confirming culling can proceed this summer in West Gloucestershire and West Somerset is an important step towards taking the action we need to tackle the spread of this disease in wildlife. I am determined that there are no further delays this year.”

 

RSPCA chief executive Gavin Grant said: “Despite overwhelming scientific, public and parliamentary opposition the government seems hell bent on pressing forward with their senseless plans to kill badgers. All the evidence shows that the answer to the problems of bovine TB in cattle does not lie in a cull that will be an ineffective, wasteful and potentially damaging to the welfare of both farm and wild animals.”

 

The authorisation letters, issued by the agency Natural England, mean that culling can go ahead from 1 June, with the pilot culls lasting six weeks and to be repeated annually for four years.

 

Paterson said that culling was only one element of the government’s attempts to tackle the disease. “We are using everything at our disposal to get to grips with TB, including new tougher controls on moving cattle, increased herd testing and working to get effective vaccines ready as soon as possible.” But a vaccine could take more than a decade to develop, he said.

 

Paterson’s commitment to the cull was warmly welcomed by farmers, but protesters gathered outside the conference building in Birmingham expressed their anger at the decision. Security was heavy as police kept them in a small area by the entrance. Their chants could be heard inside the conference centre, but not in the hall where Paterson was speaking.

 

Badgers have been blamed for helping to spread bovine TB, but there isdisagreement over whether a cull would cut the number of cattle affected. A scientific report for the last government cast doubt on culling as an effective control, and opponents say the “free shooting” of badgers would only cause them to stray further afield, potentially spreading the disease more widely. Campaigners against the cull are urging tighter controls on the movement of cattle around the country and other “biosecurity methods”, such as better fencing. But proponents of a cull point to countries that have carried them out, such as New Zealand, where a cull combined with other methods, including strict regulations on the movement of cattle, reduced the number of infected cattle and deer herds from 1,700 in the mid-1990s to fewer than 100 in 2011.

 

Mary Creagh, Labour’s shadow environment secretary, said the cull was likely to be expensive and ineffective. She said: “The government is pressing ahead with a badger cull despite 150,000 people signing a petition against it and scientists warning this is an untested and risky approach.” She said Defra‘s estimates showed the policing costs would be more than £4m for the two pilots.

 

Paterson also disappointed green campaigners concerned about bee health, by saying that any move to phase out neonicotinoid pesticides – identified as a key threat to bees – should be taken slowly. He told the conference: “We really need to find out what is happening about bees. I’m urging some delay on this. [Officials] are working flat out [on research into the pesticides]. There may be an economic impact if yields fall.”

 

Friends of the Earth’s senior nature campaigner Paul de Zylva said: “We agree that a science-led approach to pesticides is needed – and scientists warn of a link between neonicotinoid chemicals and bee decline.

 

“The UK government should support restrictions on these insecticides until the evidence shows they are not having a devastating impact on our bees and other vital pollinators.

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BADGER UPDATE : Badger cull to be delayed…?

By Henricus Peters on | Leave a Comment

Environment secretary expected to announce decision amid concerns about the cost and effectiveness of the scheme. The Independent reports.

COMMENT : Is Government finally realising the badger cull is a mess – and simply wrong!? 

The environment secretary, Owen Paterson, will announce on today (Tuesday) that the government is delaying its plan to cull thousands of badgers, probably until next year at the earliest, amid growing concern about the cost and effectiveness of the controversial scheme.

Paterson has been forced to return from an official trip abroad to oversee the U-turn, which represents another setback for the government. It is the latest in a string of embarrassments for No 10 which culminated in the resignation last week of the chief whip, Andrew Mitchell, for swearing at a police officer – prompting Conservative party grandee, Lord Tebbit, to lambast David Cameron’s operation as a “dog of a government”.

The decision will be welcomed by leading scientists who have expressed severe doubts about whether the cull will work and by animal rights and welfare activists who have continued protesting throughout the long process. The depth of public feeling was also highlighted by a 150,000 e-petition started by the musician Brian May.

The shadow environment secretary, Mary Creagh, welcomed the delay. She said: “We warned the government that this cull was bad for farmers, bad for taxpayers and bad for wildlife. The badger cull showed how out of touch the government is and this delay shows ministers are too weak and incompetent to deliver it.”

The go-ahead for the controversial badger cull was given by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) nearly a year ago. Farmers believe a cull is essential to stop the spread of bovine tuberculosis which is leading to the slaughter of many of their cattle; opponents claim the main problem is transmission between cattle and that a badger cull could make matters worse because fleeing badgers spread the disease more widely.

Last year, 26,000 cattle were slaughtered and the disease cost taxpayers £90m, including compensation to farmers.

As the final preparations for the cull were made, a census showed there could be twice as many badgers as were originally thought. Farmers complained this would increase the cost of the cull and they could not afford to foot the bill if required to kill at least 70% – the proportion that scientists say must be achieved for the cull to succeed because escaping badgers would spread TB more widely and increase, not decrease, cattle infections.

Ministers will also have been aware of a tricky week ahead as the emotive issue is scheduled for its first full debate in the House of Commons on Thursday – with the strong chance of a government defeat – and a serious legal challenge has been mounted by the charity, the Badger Trust. It filed a “pre-action” letter over the weekend, the final step before seeking judicial review, citing costs, public safety around the unmarked cull zones and uncertainty over whether the cull would kill enough badgers to be effective.

After reports of tense negotiations over the weekend, Defra is thought to have decided that it could not afford such a risk of failure.

Announcing the delay is a blow to the government: ministers, led by the former environment secretary Caroline Spelman, have spent months insisting the cull could work in the face of bitter opposition.

The government and especially the prime minister’s team in Downing Street are already under fire for a series of U-turns, botched announcements and embarrassments.

Along with the drawn-out Mitchell saga, Cameron has created a mess over energy policy, plans for House of Lords reform have fallen apart, a major boundary change is in jeopardy and the chancellor, George Osborne, has had to drop a series of unpopular policies announced in his budget.

Paterson has strongly backed a badger cull since he replaced Spelman last month, but is likely to escape the worst of the embarrassment because he is new to the job and will be seen to have acted decisively when the problems emerged.

The planned cull had suffered a series of recent blows including the discovery that there were up to twice as many badgers in the culling zones as had been expected. That sharply increased the cost of hiring the marksmen required as they were to be paid a bounty per badger killed.

Whitehall sources told the Guardian that spiralling costs and other complications had left farmers wanting to pull out of the cull: “Paterson and No 10 had to persuade the National Farmers’ Union to continue with the cull to avoid another U-turn.”

On Friday, the NFU president, Peter Kendall, said: “We are working bloody hard to make sure this is deliverable. The latest numbers are making this more challenging.”

The government’s claim to a “science-led” policy was derided by Lord John Krebs, the architect of a landmark 10-year badger culling trial. He called it “mindless” and signed a letter with 31 other eminent scientists demanding the government reconsider its plan.

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BADGER CULL : Government accused of failing to properly seek alternatives

By Henricus Peters on | 1 Comment

Ministers are going “nowhere near far enough” in seeking alternatives to the imminent cull of badgers, according the scientist who led the landmark 10-year culling trial that remains the scientific benchmark for the policy. The Guardian reports

According to Prof John Bourne, stricter measures to stop cows spreading tuberculoisis to other cows are the only way to combat the disease effectively, as they had in the 1960s when TB was virtually eradicated in England. “Despite some improvements, the government is still going nowhere near far enough with biosecurity”, he said. “It is not badgers that spread the disease throughout the country; it is cattle”.

The most recent European commission inspection of England’s biosecurity uncovered a catalogue of failures , including missed targets in the rapid removal of infected cattle with TB and “weaknesses in disinfection at farm, vehicle, market and slaughterhouse levels”.

Another eminent scientist and former government scientific adviser, Lord Robert May, pointed to vaccination as an important tool in tackling TB, which Welsh ministers have backed after abandoning their cull plans. “What is particularly irritating is that we have the vaccines in the pipeline, but the commitment to really go in and test them is really not there,” he said. The coalition cancelled five of the six trials of injectable badger vaccines on taking office.

A spokesman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said: “Culling is only one part of the government’s approach. We are also strengthening cattle controls to reduce the risk of disease spreading between cattle and increasing surveillance. Vaccination remains a long-term goal and we are investing £15.5m in developing workable vaccines over the next four years.”

Bovine tuberculosis is rising in England and resulted in 26,000 cattle being slaughtered in 2011 and compensation payments of £90m. Environment secretary Owen Paterson has insisted that culling badgers, which can carry TB, is a necessary measure and derided widespread opposition as “sad sentimentality”.

Bourne said: “The real reason for the cull is that politicians are desperate and I think farmers have been hoodwinked for years.”

He said key differences between his team’s methodology and the government’s cull, including a very different killing method and much longer killing period, were significant: “It could make TB a damn sight worse.”

Bourne was one of dozens of senior scientists who demanded the “mindless” government cull be halted in a letter to the Observer on Sunday and accused ministers of misusing the science. Ministers claimed the science has moved on since the decade-long trial ended in 2007. But Lord John Krebs, the architect of the trial, rejected this: “That is simply not true.”

Krebs said he was puzzled at the zeal of the National Farmers’ Union for the cull: “Their President Peter Kendall is going to have a lot of angry farmers on his hands in three-four years’ time, saying we have spent a lot of money on the cull but we still have TB.”

Kendall said: “No one, not the NFU, nor the farmers involved, wants to kill badgers. But TB must be stopped from making its relentless march across our countryside. Only by using all of the available tools in the box will we begin to get on top of this terrible disease.”

Mary Creagh, the shadow environment secretary, said: “This is not a science-based policy, it is just a shot in the dark. The government must abandon the cull.”

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Badger Update : Tempers rising over cull as farmers confront activists

By Henricus Peters on | 2 Comments

As saboteurs mobilise and signatures on the e-petition of rock star Brian May soar, tensions are running high over plans to eradicate bovine TB in a shooting campaign – a policy which a government adviser has branded ‘crazy’. The Observer reports

Wet noses are leaving trails on his fleece, cows snuffling on one sleeve and Stig the border collie on the other. Ankle-deep in mud on his beef cattle farm near Stratford-upon-Avon, Adam Quinney doesn’t hunt, fish or shoot and shakes his head at the idea he is fired up with “bloodlust”. He lost 18 of his 70 cattle a year ago, one of the 24% of farms in the southwest of England to find their herds infected with bovine TB, a disease which not only costs stock but also puts the whole farm into shutdown, escalating costs just as income dives.

He has heard all the arguments, read the science, personally debated with rock guitarist Brian May, and accepts many of the points put forward by the badger lobby: “We shouldn’t have got to this point; we should have culled years ago and we wouldn’t have TB. We all want the same thing in the end, healthy cattle and healthy badgers. But this polarisation is worrying. A lot of people have no knowledge and no understanding and they’re getting fired up.

“We’ve had the activists talking about coming on with fireworks and dogs, but if they scare the badgers, will they return to their setts or move on? They could be walking through badger latrines carrying the TB themselves. What about bio-security?”

As vice-president of the National Farmers Union, Quinney helped set the boundaries for the Gloucestershire pilot cull area, which was given its licence last Monday. He sees a cull as only part of the solution. The lack of an organised plan to tackle bovine TB is what the majority of farmers are fed up with, he says.

“We need a complete programme, not a pick and mix. Farmers were promised a vaccine. Each year for 20 years we have been told there is a vaccine just a few years away and have been sold a pup. We shouldn’t have got to this point. Bovine TB is hardly a new disease.”

Last year he invited volunteers from the Badger Trust on to his land and for four weeks they tried to trap and vaccinate badgers against TB. They managed to vaccinate just one of them. “I felt desperately sorry for them – they were out every night,” Quinney says. “I can’t even estimate the effort and money they put in and was disappointed on their behalf as much as mine.

“Badger numbers are on the rise. They don’t have a natural predator: the only one they have is the Ford Mondeo. Hedgehogs on the other hand are disappearing pretty fast from around here and their predator is the badger. Maybe someone should start speaking up for Mrs Tiggywinkle.”

This latest run-in between country folk and town folk, the old stereotypes from the days of mad cow disease and the fox hunt debate, have come back to haunt farmers.

On one side is the image of the hard-nosed farmer with his shotgun who stuffs his cows with too many antibiotics; on the other anti-cull supporters are accused of being over-sentimental townies who want their food cheap and animals cuddly. When the shooting finally starts, it is expected to get far worse. Hunt saboteurs and animal rights activists last week held meetings in Bristol and Brighton to start mobilising volunteers prepared to take part in night patrols across 300 sq km (116 sq miles) of Gloucestershire. Armed with vuvuzelas and high-visibility vests, activists are being encouraged to take dogs and to urinate on any bait traps they find to scare the animals away. They are being asked not to set off fireworks.

Some anti-cull campaigners have been posting contact details for pro-cull MPs and farmers and, although organisers are appealing for people to remain polite, last week Jan Rowe, a farmer from Cheltenham, said he and his wife, Gill, had been targeted by hate mail. Tripadvisor had to take down dozens of nasty comments posted under Mrs Rowe’s B&B listing on the holiday website.

Farmer baiting and animal activist mocking is set to become an internet sport.

Bovine TB spreading

Jack Reedy of the Badger Trust said: “It’s an ugly spot we’re in. Everyone is getting nervous about the debate and coming out on one side or the other. There’s pressure on farmers as a body to back this and say vaccination won’t help, but there’s a lot feeling uncomfortable. We have farmers being intimidated.”

Tony Hunt has been making nocturnal visits to the same family of badgers at a sett near his Gloucestershire home for more than 25 years and, although he is against activism, admits: ‘They’d have a job stopping me going up to sit there every night if they were coming for my family sett.

“There’s no science to support a cull. It won’t work. A lot of farmers I know don’t want it. But they can’t talk about it out in the open any more for fear they’ll be hung, drawn and quartered. I know of at least one who has been threatened.

“After the foot and mouth, when people were replenishing their herds and moving cattle all over the country, no one was testing them for TB first. In the 1970s an opportunity to develop a vaccine was lost. The government has let it slip. They don’t even know how many badgers there are. They don’t know how many of them have TB.”

EU laws currently prevent cattle from being vaccinated against the disease because the effect of current inoculations can make it difficult to detect if the disease is present. That ban discourages any pharmaceutical company from getting involved in the research.

Scientist Lord Krebs, a government adviser who led an eight-year study into the spread of bovine TB, has also branded the two government-led culls as “crazy”.

The debate has been further polarised by the RSPCA, which has come out against the cull and ignited further controversy as chief executive Gavin Grant called for “badger-friendly” labels on milk and yoghurt so shoppers can boycott farms involved in culls.

“This campaign is gathering incredible momentum,” he said. “The speed of this growth shows the scale of public interest. The government must listen to what the public are saying and give this matter parliamentary time. It needs to look at this science and reverse this short-sighted decision immediately to one of vaccination. Let’s cure, not kill.”

An e-petition set up by former Queen guitarist Brian May moved over the 136,000 signatories mark yesterday, something which supporters hope will win badgers a debate in the Commons over their fate. So far, out of 10 petitions which have passed the 100,000 signature threshold, eight have won a parliament debate.

Adam Quinney still faces the TB test at his farm with his heart in his mouth. The cull is expected to reduce the prevalence of bovine TB in cattle by 16%. “That’s a start,” he says. “If you were offered a pay rise of 16% you’d be pleased, wouldn’t you? It’s better than nothing.”

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Badger Update : Full-scale cull set to get government go-ahead

By Henricus Peters on | 4 Comments

After legal challenges, a ‘deathly’ (backward) step for (against) badgers …. First licence expected to be issued in policy that could lead to a third of the animal’s national population being shot. The Guardian reports

The government is poised to give the go-ahead to the first full-scale cull of badgers in England, under a policy that could soon mean as many as 100,000 of the animals – a third of the national population – are shot dead by farmers in an attempt to protect cattle from bovine tuberculosis.

According to Whitehall sources, the first of two licences is expected to be issued as soon as Monday for a large pilot cull area in Gloucestershire, which is a hotspot for bovine TB.

Previously, there have been localised trials to test the science behind such culls. Yet despite the mixed results of the tests, ministers have decided to push ahead with the national scheme after winning an appeal-court battle brought by campaigners last week.

In 2011, 26,000 cows were slaughtered because of the disease, which can also be carried by badgers.

A decade-long scientific trial of badger culling concluded that such killing could make ”no meaningful contribution”, and was “not an effective way” to control the disease. But the government is going forward with the plan under intense pressure from British farmers.

A Defra spokesman said: “We will continue to work with the farmingindustry so badger control in two pilot areas can start as soon as is practical.”

As yet, no badgers have been killed as part of the cull, but with only straightforward administrative steps required after the granting of the licence, culling could begin within days.

Owen Paterson, the environment secretary, is a fervent supporter of the cull, having tabled a record 600 parliamentary questions on the issue while serving as environment spokesman in opposition.

In an interview with the Farmers Guardian on Friday, Patterson appeared to cast the proposed cull as being of benefit to badgers: “I find the attitude of those who want these wonderful animals to die of this disgusting disease [bovine TB] completely incomprehensible.”

But Mary Creagh, the shadow environment secretary, said: “The cull will cost more than it saves, put a huge strain on the police, and will spread bovine TB in the short term as badgers are disturbed by the shooting. Ministers should listen to the scientists and can this cull – which is bad for farmers, bad for taxpayers and bad for wildlife.”

A source in Paterson’s department said the controversial policy was causing great anxiety: “The panic among senior officials outweighs anything since foot and mouth. It makes The Thick of It look tame and gentle.”

The government has refused to release numerous documents under freedom of information rules, including advice from the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir John Beddington, and communication with the National Farmers Union. The latter was blocked on the grounds that it was “internal communication”.

Natural England, the licensing body, said: “We are working flat out with licence applicants on processing their applications. We will issue licences to enable control activity to commence in the pilot areas as soon as is possible.”

The licence will be issued to a group of farmers and landowners who will commit to killing at least 70% of the badgers on their land for at least four years in a row.

The government’s own impact assessment concluded that it would cost farmers more to carry out the cull than to do nothing and suffer any losses from bovine TB.

The licence area must also have “hard boundaries”, such as rivers, to prevent badgers fleeing and potentially spreading the disease and making the situation worse.

The government pointed to the 16% cut in bovine TB found at the end of the 10-year trial but the new culls will use a different killing method. Instead of trapping then shooting – considered expensive – the badgers will be “free shot” by marksmen. The deaths have to occur before 1 February, when the close season for badger shooting begins and runs till 31 May.

But the start of the cull could be halted by a legal challenge to the licence. The Badger Trust, which unsuccessfully challenged the government’s cull policy in the appeal court last week, stated: “We will continue to pursue all legal means to stop culling. We will closely study any licences issued by Natural England.” The trust was successful in a previous legal action against badger culling in Wales. Campaigners are also pursuing a complaint against the government in Europe under the Bern convention, which governs wildlife and habitat protection.

A licence for a cull in Somerset is thought to be taking longer to process due to a legal issue involving the crown estate, but sources said they did not expect that to prevent the licence being granted in due course.

Animal rights campaigners are determined to halt the trials through protests at the cull sites, whose location is not being made public. Volunteers plan to patrol the zones and stop the badgers coming into the open.

The Gloucestershire and Somerset culls are trials meant to test whether free shooting is as effective as trapping and shooting.

Critics say the short time of the trials will be insufficient for comparison with the decade-long trial, but if the government calls the trials a success, killing will happen across affected areas in England and is expected to end the lives of 70,000 to 105,000 badgers – from an entire UK population estimated at 300,000.

A badger vaccination plan is replacing the Welsh cull. Vaccination is also being tested in Devon by the National Trust, and by the Wildlife Trust in Gloucestershire.

The last Labour government said an oral badger vaccine would be ready by 2015. The coalition cancelled five of six trials of injectable vaccines, and said a viable oral vaccine was “years away”.

Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/sep/16/badger-cull-government-go-ahead

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