Back Off Badgers Petition.

[Matthew.Passmore]

The RSPCA is reacting with horror and disbelief to the muddled suggestion by a select committee of MPs that badger-culling might help reduce cattle tuberculosis (TB) in some areas. Help by signing the petition before the government makes the decision to proceed with a mass slaughter of one of Britain's most loved mammals.

"Any attempt at badger-culling flies in the face of sound scientific judgement," says John Rolls, the RSPCA's director of animal welfare promotion.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs' (Defra) public consultation on badger-culling prompted a record 47,472 responses, 95% of which opposed a cull.

http://www.backoffbadgers.org.uk/

(Sorry if this has already been posed I have not seen it.)

 

[demographic]

I read a study in New Scientist a while ago that suggested that if they cull the badgers that tend to move about more which actually increases the problem, it said that a more cost effective way of treating the problem was to test the cattle once a year and restrict cattle movement accordingly, funny that

Some articles about badgers...

Everyone seems to have forgotten, but the UK used to have a tuberculosis-prevention scheme for cattle that reduced the prevalence of the disease from countrywide to small hotspots in the south-west by the early 1970s (17 December 2005, p 8). Cattle-to-cattle spread was curbed purely by annual testing of cattle and movement restriction, without any badger culling at all. A similar scheme succeeded in Ireland and Northern Ireland. The latter has always regarded badgers as a spillover host of TB from cattle.

The present cattle TB crisis is, in my opinion, a direct result of the 2001 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak. The disruption of testing and movement controls has allowed TB to spread.

Cattle TB is in any case a respiratory disease affecting the lungs - a pneumonia - and after 30 years of trying, no one has been able to show how badgers supposedly infect cows. They can get TB by ingesting contaminated food or water, but need a dose of at least a million bacilli - so they would need to drink 3 millilitres of badger urine (about 300,000 bacilli are present in a millilitre), which is improbable.

AFTER almost 10 years of investigation, we now know that wild badgers are not principally to blame for spreading bovine tuberculosis to cattle in Britain. This may not seem to be of much relevance anywhere else, but the badger-TB story is a lesson in how impeccable science can be ignored - in this case, by farmers.

The report, by the Independent Scientific Group on Cattle TB (ISG), set up in 1998, rubbishes the dogma that has prevailed since TB began appearing on farms in the 1970s. This holds that badgers spread TB to cattle, and exterminating badgers is the only way to halt it. Except that it won't, according to the ISG. Cattle themselves are the major spreaders of TB, and focusing on them, not badgers, will solve the problem. Simply test them more often for TB, using the reliable gamma interferon method, and restrict movement of cattle around the country. That should stop TB in its tracks, says the report.

"The diagnostic systems are inadequate, which results in too many infected, undiagnosed animals remaining in the herd, spreading TB around locally and over long distances," says John Bourne, professor of animal health at the University of Bristol, UK, and chairman of the ISG.

A trial started in 1998 to test what would happen to cattle TB if badgers were killed. In a third of 30 zones of 100 square kilometres where TB was already present, as many badgers as possible were killed each year; in another third, badgers were killed only when there were outbreaks; in the final third, no badgers were killed.

A drop in cattle TB within the culling zones was offset by increases in areas beyond the zone perimeter that were originally free of TB, as infected badgers left the culling zone (New Scientist, 17 December 2005, p 8). "The net effect was that after five years of intense culling, we saved 14 farms from outbreaks, but the economics of it doesn't make any sense," says Bourne.

The cost of culling is 40 times the potential savings, says the report. Reactive culling was of no benefit at all. TB probably first spreads from cattle to badgers, where it remains stable provided the badgers are undisturbed. But start killing them, and they wander around, triggering new cattle infections.

The National Farmers' Union insists that gassing badgers would be more efficient. "If culling remains outlawed, farmers will take the law into their own hands,"

SEVEN years ago, the UK government set out to answer a seemingly simple question: does culling wild badgers, a protected species thought to be responsible for spreading tuberculosis, prevent the disease spreading to cattle? This week the answer finally arrived. But it was not the simple yes or no answer that most people had hoped for.

In the worst affected regions of the UK, in the south-west of England, bovine TB infects about 10 per cent of the cattle population. Farmers have long blamed badgers for spreading the disease, and a trial was launched in 1998 to find out whether culling could quash it. Since then 11,000 badgers have been killed in 30 trial areas of about 100 square kilometres each.

Christl Donnelly of Imperial College London and her team analysed rates of TB in cattle both inside and beyond the culling zone boundaries. They found that intense "proactive" culling within the zone reduced TB incidence by 19 per cent, but that rates increased by 29 per cent in a 2-kilometre-wide ring around the zone. So reducing TB within the culled zones happens at the expense of previously disease-free farms just outside (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature04454).

A second study, led by Rosie Woodroffe of the University of California, Davis, suggests that this may be because the culling pushed badgers outside their usual territories. The team tracked the badgers by placing indigestible colour-coded beads in bait, which allowed them to identify which set a badger was from by examining its faeces.

Woodroffe and her colleagues report online in the Journal of Applied Ecology (DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2664.2005.01144.x) that the culling disrupted badger territories, making survivors roam much wider than usual and reach farms beyond their usual range.

Taken together, the studies confirm that proactive culling prompts roaming badgers to spread TB beyond the culling zone. "Even with widespread culling, you help some farmers but make things worse for others," says Donnelly. Culling will only work if the culling zones are vastly extended and badgers are prevented from roaming outside them, or if culling takes place right up to a natural border.

The results leave the government with a dilemma. "If they ban culling, they could end up with a serious problem of patchy illegal culling, which would probably make matters worse for local cattle," says Donnelly. "But if they go ahead with culling, some farmers will be unhappy because they're on the periphery."

The Badger Trust conservation group wants the government to shift the focus towards preventing the spread of TB among cattle by improving diagnosis and testing. Its spokesman Trevor Lawson says that since Northern Ireland introduced such measures in November 2004, rates of TB there have fallen by 40 per cent.

 

[jojo]

I have signed up to the petition so has my wife. I can't believe they are bringing this up again. And again totally ignoring scientific research that has showed the badgers are not responsible.

What does it take for politicians and bureaucrats to learn to leave things alone that aren't broke and don't need fixing. And no doubt as usual, they will ignore "consultation" and scientists.

Looking for scapegoats to blame for their ineptitude.

 

[JonnyP]

Signed it...
I am not really clued up on all this and I know there are a lot of arguements for and against the badgers carrying the TB about and I do feel sorry for the farmers who are affected, but I am certainly not in favour of killing off loads of badgers...

 

[Shewie]

Thanks for the heads-up Matt, signed and passed on


Rich