We are celebrating our first anniversary with a special concert called BROCKSTOCK at the Electric Palace in Bridport on Saturday 21 June.  Founded in June 2013, Dorset for Badger and Bovine Welfare are returning to the town where we held our first ever public event. We’re celebrating a year which has seen the proposed cull of badgers in Dorset abandoned and the rollout of a project which enables farmers and landowners to have the badgers on their land vaccinated against TB rather than culled, at a fraction of the cost of a commercial operation.

Saturday’s stellar line-up boasts a wealth of local talent, with headliners, Worry Dolls, from Bournemouth supported by local favourites Sketchy Dog, Andrea Kelly, Ian Sedwell, The Diluted and The High Cs. The doors open at 7pm with the first act on at 7:30 and the entertainment running until midnight. Tickets, available on the door, are £10 each and all of the money raised will go to protect badgers in Dorset and beyond. There will also be free acoustic performances in the foyer from 1-6pm, along with stalls and a raffle.

It’s been a tremendous year for us. We feared the worst at this time last year, when Owen Patterson was talking about the cull being rolled out to 10 more counties in 2014, with Dorset being top of the list. As it happened, the trial culls in Somerset and Gloucestershire were a disaster, and the independent expert panel labelled them “inhumane” and “ineffective”. We are now focusing on supporting our neighbours in Somerset, who are facing a cull again this year, and trying to ensure as many of Dorset’s badgers are vaccinated as possible.