I've been at the CLA Game Fair today - always an interesting event!
I met lots of old friends and some people I wouldn't exactly class as friends but are quite interesting.
We had a small reception on our stand which was well attended - including two Defra Ministers, Mr Paice and Mr Benyon. Our Chief Executive, Mike Clarke spoke about Futurescapes and the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust's relatively new Chairman, Ian Coghill, made an excellent speech which majored on collaboration. Ian would, himself, be a very easy person with whom to collaborate.
I was on a panel which was supposed to discuss whether the government's priority should be fox-hunting, badger culling or bird conservation!It was a discussion about badgers!
Because the Minister Mr Paice was on the panel we learned quite a lot - I think I helped to tease out the information. The government will consult in the autumn on the way forward. This will include a review of the science and an approach which will, it seems, include some culling, some vaccination and some controls on cattle movements. The costs of any culling will largely be met by the farming industry.
I think the RSPB can welcome this approach. This issue is very contentious - that much was clear in the room and each time I mention badgers on this blog. To set out the thinking and the science must be a good idea. I am sure that Mr Paice is keen to see some badger culling go ahead, but at least the government is sticking to its election manifesto pledge to be led by science (it seems) and at least there will be a consultation before a decision. We await the consultation with interest.
A love of the natural world demonstrates that a person is a cultured inhabitant of planet Earth.
Mark – you said ‘keep the comments coming’
People and organisations such as the RSPB wish to follow the science and assume that the RBCT (trials) were spot-on and the operation, findings and conclusions were scientifically sound – this assumption is a long way from the truth – so I include details of a report submitted to the EFRA committee by a senior member of the Wildlife team with over 12 years experience who operated the RBCT and he says:
1. BRO's (Badger removals) worked well when the land being culled was made fully available. (We would guess he is referring to the drastic reduction made to areas avaible for BRO's from 7km down to 1 km and then only on land cattle had grazed)
2. Where (problem) badgers were totally removed from a farm, that farm after reactor cattle had been culled, often stayed clear of Tb for up to 10 years.
3. We stayed on farms for up to three months to ensure ALL badgers were caught - unlike the Krebs 8 days per year trapping regime.
4. You do not need large scale trapping for it to be effective, if the culling is robust from the start.
5. Krebs had too many anomolies and weaknesses in the strategy for it to be successful. It took us four years to steer away from trapping setts that had been interfered with by Animal Rights Activists, to be able to trap badgers anywhere, in order to eliminate them. That was only one of a raft of operational problems we faced and had to endure.
6. Limited trapping - eight days per year with Krebs - has little effect if carried out late in the year. The effect being that areas went almost two years without an effective cull. (In some cases three, or not at all)
7. The costs for a future culling policy must NOT be based on Krebs costings.
Krebs was ridiculously expensive for what it delivered.
8. ...... 'Professionals' should remain involved …. to ensure that animal welfare and humaneness remain number one priority.
9. Compulsory entry onto farms is a must. Krebs has proven that wide scale non co operation does make it nigh on impossible to operate effectively.
10. The Krebs Reactive strategy ended prematurely in my opinion. The results used also showed us that in areas we had never operated in (J2 and H1 which had a very limited cull) also displayed the same increase in bTb outside of the areas. That has to be another logical reason for the increase, as it is clearly not badger- culling related. This point has yet to be satisfactorily answered.
11. The combined knowledge of the staff involved in all the previous culling strategies has never been utilised or sought when putting together a Policy.
.............. Scientists do not have all the answers and most certainly Krebs doesn't. The Trial has far too many flaws in it to be trusted to produce meaningful evidence. I know what happened on the ground - the scientists only have the results which we provided them with to work with. I know that those results could and should have been much better and useful than they currently are.
Nobody - and I do mean nobody, working on the Trial at grass roots level has ever believed that operating under the too strict and inflexible regime that Krebs put in place could work successfully. All common sense answers to everyday problems were too often ignored because "things had to carried out scientifically" to mean anything. The whole basis of Krebs was to remove badgers off the ground. For the first four years, that effort was farcical due to restrictions placed upon us. Repeated requests to change operating methods were ignored. With that in mind, how much weight do we give the ISG report, detailing their 'robust' findings to the Minister?
If it were down to me and my staff, very little."
Thus the final report was built on sand.
Where Prof Krebs said "100% culling" - the RBCT actually achieved between a pathetic 20% and "try harder" 75% and recently the latest reports are stating that even the previous minimal culling exercise is still reaping benefits with "significant decreases in bTB in cattle" (Professor Christl Donnelly)