The government’s badger culling project is getting more unscientific by the day, or should one say by the square kilometre?

A few days ago Natural England announced that, for this year’s badger culls, a ‘total of 29 applications or expressions of interest for a badger control licence’ have been received, from Cheshire, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Somerset, Wiltshire and Worcestershire. According to south-western media, 25 of these applications are for areas within Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Dorset. Which leaves just 4 covering the other 5 counties!

Consult and ignore

When the government held a public consultation on badger culling, the previous Labour government having decided, as a result of the Randomised Badger Culling Trials, not to implement a cull, it received 59,000 responses, very many of them raising serious scientific concerns.

Regardless, the government announced in 2010 that ‘a carefully managed and science-led policy of badger control’ would be introduced; their ‘rules’ stated that culling must take place over a minimum area of 150km² so ‘we can be confident it will have a net beneficial effect’. This despite the Randomised Badger Culling Trials having concluded culling badgers would ‘have no meaningful effect’ in preventing the spread of bovine TB.   Goodbye, science.

In the autumn of 2015 another public consultation was held about proposed changes to the criteria governing culling. Those results were ignored too, Liz Truss happily announcing that ‘further statistical analysis’ of the RBCT (whose results have been constantly misquoted by the government) and ‘post-trial analysis’ allowed for the minimum culling area to come down from 150 km² to 100 km² .

The RSPCA, in its response to the government’s 2010 consultation (a must read), pointed out that the post-trial analysis had already been considered by the previous government when taking the decision not to engage in badger culling. Yet again, the Environment Secretary is misrepresenting the facts.

Even worse and despite the firm recommendation of the RBCT to confine culling to a 6-week period (causing the least pertubation of badger populations possibly spreading the disease), she made it far more convenient for the farmers. Basically, apart from the closed season when cubs are being reared, it’s now almost open season.

Cullers don’t like small areas

However, culling contractors prefer large areas, hoping that the sheer miles involved will discourage those people trying to defend badgers from the guns. According to NE, the applications cover areas ranging from from 135 km² to 655 km², with the average area being approximately 330 km². (For those who walk, drive and think in miles, those figures are 52.1, 253.8 and 127.4 square miles respectively.)

How can one achieve an even half-accurate estimate of the badger population in an area of 127 or 252 square miles that could contain major differences in geology, soil and landscape? Yet it is on this dodgy estimate that the number of badgers to be culled per year is decided by Natural England. But NE doesn’t have the staff to cover the ground and farmers consistently overestimate how many badgers a sett holds.

Many do not understand that a single group of badgers may have more than one sett. Or that a long established sett may have over 30 entrances/holes yet no more than 5 or 6 badgers in residence, the average family group being 5.9 badgers. One farmer’s over-estimate for the number of badgers on his land amounted to three badgers per acre. Rabbits maybe. Badgers no.

Is culling badgers the only option?

No. In 2011 the European Commission carried out an audit on the UK’s efforts in controlling bTB in cattle. The report was damning, highlighting many areas where testing, cattle movement controls and biosecurity measures were quite simply inadequate.

The UK produced some defensive comments on the report (the word ‘wildlife’ appeared just once, and badgers not at all) and then a proposed plan to deal with the situation, implemented in 2013. But until England follows the route taken by Wales (e.g. annual TB testing on all cattle, not just in selected areas), England’s farmers will still struggle to gain control over bTB.

Biosecurity on farms is an absolute must if one is serious about controlling any form of disease (bird or swine flu for example) that might be transmitted by wildlife or stock on neighbouring farms, particularly when one considers that intensive farming methods compromise the immune systems of the animals, making them more vulnerable to infection.

But how many farms do you have to see with your eyes wide shut before noticing that too many are still lax in their biosecurity controls, putting not just themselves at risk, but also those farms in the area that do take matters seriously. And easy as it is to blame the wildlife, the far greater risk comes from herds where bTB is endemic. The farming industry, not badgers, needs to bite the bullet.

Infected Badger Populations’

Defra talks about ‘infected badger populations’, but in all this pseudo science there is no effort to investigate how much bTB really is present among badgers. During the first two years of culling in Somerset and Gloucester, no badgers were tested for bTB. Rumour has it that an independent laboratory is now thinking of doing such a study on badgers in one of the Western Region counties but surely, if the government wants to go on claiming this is a ‘science-led policy’, it must conduct its own rigorous, unbiased and transparent investigation.

It won’t, of course.   Such a study would only demonstrate that badgers are nowhere near being a major part of the problem. Further, any government-funded reports that don’t agree with its policies may be muzzled. One can expect neither sense nor science from a government that appears to be allowing the closure of the National Wildlife Crime Agency.   For the majority of us, culling badgers is one of those crimes.

Lesley Docksey © 22/02/16

Roll it out across the country, with far fewer criteria to control the gunmen, that’s what Liz Truss wants.

The Environment Secretary’s statement to parliament on the 2015 badger culls in Somerset, Gloucester and Dorset, naturally made when MPs were about to go home for their Christmas jollifications, would have been laughable if it wasn’t such a dire repeat of the previous two years’ misinformation and bad science.

She cites the Chief Veterinary Officer as saying ‘that industry-led badger control’ – a chilling term – will achieve disease control benefits. She says the government’s approach to dealing with bTB has worked in other countries. It hasn’t. The only country that has seriously culled its badger population is Ireland, and the facts from there are very dodgy.

The one welcome announcement was that they are finally going to introduce statutory post-movement testing for cattle, something many farmers have been crying out for. But even that only goes so far.

An unsubstantiated claim by Truss

Answering MPs’ questions, Truss claimed that more than half of England (the Low Risk Area) will officially bTB free by 2020, but ignored the fact that:

• Scotland has been officially bTB free for quite some years, without culling badgers.
• Wales took the decision in 2009 NOT to cull badgers but to have strict bio-security measures, cattle movement controls and annual testing for all cattle.  This has almost halved their cattle slaughter rate and they are on the way to becoming bTB free without killing badgers.
• The Low Risk northern and eastern regions, although they currently have little bTB, have also not benefited from annual testing and tighter cattle movement controls. The incidence of TB is rising.

Asked by Labour MP David Hanson how many of the thousands of killed badgers had been tested for bTB, she first blamed Labour for creating the problem of bTB and then said, “I am following the advice of the Chief Veterinary Officer, who says that culling is an important part of dealing with it.   Why do Labour Members not congratulate the hard-working farmers in Somerset, Gloucestershire and Dorset who have delivered this year, and who are helping us to deal with this terrible disease?”

Untested badgers were not mentioned (bar one in the first year of culling, none have been tested).

Neil Parrish, the pro-culling Devon Tory MP said that “In Gloucestershire and Somerset, there has been a very beneficial reduction in the number of cattle suffering from TB in the badger culling areas.” He then asked, “When will the Secretary of State be able to release the figures that will show what is happening?”

Maybe when the moon turns blue, because if there genuinely were figures to support his statement Liz Truss would have been touting them around every media outlet she could find.

Let’s use some facts  

Truss claims that the badger culls in Somerset and Gloucester (their third year of culling) and Dorset (experiencing its first) have been successful. What does that mean? Successful in killing lots of badgers? Or successful in lowering the incidence of bovine TB among cattle?

The culls are being carried out in very small areas of each county (Somerset approx. 4% of the total land mass, Gloucester approx. 7% and Dorset approx. 8%). One really cannot claim that culling badgers in such a small percentage of land is affecting the TB rates enough to be counted as ‘successful’.

Defra’s own statistics show that annual testing of cattle and other bTB control measures in Dorset was reducing TB without culling. And there is evidence, slight it is true, that perturbation of badger populations in Somerset has resulted in new incidents of bTB around the edge of the culling area.

This evidence comes from a website that maps bTB outbreaks in England for the last 5 years. It is worth noting that according to this map there was a total of 9-10 farms in the North Dorset culling area that had bTB breakdowns in 2015, only three of which were still under restrictions at the time of the badger cull. Compared to the spread of incidents in parts of Devon and Cornwall, this looks pretty sparse, and makes one wonder just why Dorset was allowed to have a cull.

The NFU was not happy when campaigners found and used this site. But it is factual, unlike claims based on hearsay rather than figures.

In 2014 the then Environment Secretary Owen Paterson was foolish enough to repeat to a farming journalist, as fact, something a Gloucester farmer had claimed; that since badger culling had started there had been a huge increase in ground-nesting birds (dead badgers don’t eat birds, and it’s not a staple food for live ones).   This was news to the RSPB and embarrassing for Defra when they were queried about it.

This is, if course, a ‘science-led’ control of badgers

These culls are no longer pretending to be ‘pilot badger culls’, due to run for four years before being rolled out across the country. Until they are completed there can be no properly assessed scientific evidence that culling badgers will result in less bTB. To have any roll-out without that evidence is utterly unscientific. Nor is it bovine TB control. It is just ‘badger control’.

Defra launched a consultation on 28 August 2015 on their plans to ‘update’ the criteria for culling even more badgers. The 2015 culls started just three days later, on the August Bank Holiday.

They solicited responses by emailing over 300 ‘interested parties’. Others had to find out for themselves, which meant that some badger groups only had a few days to send in their responses before the month-long consultation closed.

There were 1378 responses, 90 percent of them from the public. Farmers and farming organisations accounted for just 3 percent. The fact that the 2010 consultation on badger culling elicited over 59,000 responses demonstrates how unpublicised government consultations can be, particularly when they don’t want to hear the answers.

Three proposals were offered:

The length of the culls should not be limited to the current 6 weeks

1. Allowing culling in a much smaller area (100km² rather than the current 200km² plus)
2. Providing more flexibility (or ‘anything goes’) for licensing of new areas of culling

Having dismissed those who were against badger culling in principle (“many responses appeared to have been submitted in response to campaigns…”), it must have been clear to Defra what the majority opinion was:

All three proposals could increase the perturbation of badger populations, leading to increases of TB in cattle (as proved by the Randomised Badger Culling Trials). All three proposals were moving away from the criteria set by the RBCT – a legitimate argument seeing that the government relied heavily on the RBCT to justify culling badgers, while happily misquoting its findings.

There were also worries on welfare issues and the possibility that local populations could be wiped out. Of the several hundred responses to each question, only 40-46 people broadly supported the proposals mostly, judging from the reasons given, because they would hamper those trying to protect badgers.

To all of which Defra replied that the responses “have helped inform the Secretary of State’s decision to implement the proposals”, which is a horrifying prospect for England’s badgers. It will almost amount to badgers being shot wherever and whenever the gunmen choose. And, seeing that the government has refused to release the true costs of culling badgers, it will cost unknown sums in policing. On only one thing have they given way – they have apparently agreed to test culled badgers for bovine TB.

And what will they do if it is found that too few badgers have bTB? Apart from staying very, very silent. Or make use of that statement (attributed to Truss) about failing defences in last month’s disastrous floods:

“Our defences worked really well right up to the point at which they failed.”

Lesley Docksey © 04/01/16 (First published by The Ecologist)