Yesterday, the media focused on the hacking scandal and the foam pie thrown at the most powerful media mogul in the world. It was therefore perhaps not surprising that there were so few MPs in the House to listen to Secretary of State Caroline Spelman's announcement about a new bovine TB eradication programme.
The announcement includes badger culling proposals. The detail is as follows:
Our headline reactionis shown here. But below, I offer a little more detail.
I should start by reiterating our understanding and sympathy of concerns within the farming community over the impact of bovine TB. This is an important and significant disease and we need to find effective, sustainable solutions to stop its spread and ultimately eradicate it.
We welcome the recognition in Defra's proposals that cattle movement, cattle testing and biosecurity measures are at the heart of this. Although it seems that most of the cattle measures are still being considered. We also welcome the commitment to developing oral badger vaccine and cattle vaccine.
However, we are opposed to the inclusion of two pilot areas for badger culling, with the intention to extend culling after a year trial. Detailed scientific work on badger culling and cattle TB suggest that culling could have a small beneficial effect but only if carried out effectively, simultaneously, over a wide area (at least 150 km2) and in a co-ordinated manner over at least four years. Culling badgers disrupts their social structures and causes more badger movement between different groups. This ‘perturbation’ increases the spread disease and the prevalence of TB in the remaining badger population. Inefficient, short lived, poorly co-ordinated or timed culling can increase rather than reduce the number of cattle TB outbreaks.
The UK Government had pledged to base its approach on science. However, the use of shooting free ranging badgers is untested and it could well increase perturbation. It is our view that it has no place in a science-led approach. In addition, Defra costs estimates for this work are seriously unrealistic. It also seems that the UK Government has underestimated the costs of culling to farmers. Even so their figures show that an effective, well co-ordinated cull will cost farmers more than it will save them in cattle TB breakdowns prevented.
The science suggests that badger culling in the two pilot areas proposed by the UK Government may reduce TB breakdowns by about 16% over 9 years but that these benefits will take some time to accrue. This begs the question what will be done about the remaining 84% of TB in these areas and TB in the rest of the country.
Under the Bern Convention badgers can be killed to prevent serious disease but only where there is no other satisfactory solution. Field trials have shown that badger vaccination was effective in reducing the proportion of badgers testing positive to TB by 74%. Although modelling suggests that, in the short term, vaccination may not prevent as many TB outbreaks as an efficient cull, the difference is marginal. In contrast to culling, there are no risks of badger vaccination making the disease situation worse. The badger vaccine could provide an important component in a programme of TB control measures.
This is why we believe that badger vaccination offers a satisfactory, publicly acceptable alternative to badger culling.
The public seems to support this view as well. Licensing the killing of one of the most popular native animals is likely to provoke significant public opposition. 69% of the 59,450 people who responded to the Government consultation were opposed to culling. This appears to be a policy of little gain for a lot of pain!
While the media interest in the hacking scandal is likely to abate over the next few weeks, come the autumn, I think that the spotlight will fall on badgers once again.