It costs £35,000 to trap & kill each 'infected' badger, about £7 million a year!
Stop DEFRA wasting lives and taxpayers money, get involved NOW!
Look its Cattle to cattle transmission that is the main cause of bovine TB, yet badgers carry on being killed and scapegoated. The UK government carries on with this political whitewash scam to placate the farming lobby - wasting millions of pounds and causing the deaths of thousands of cattle and badgers.
While there isn't enough of cattle TB testing and no proper cattle movement controls, bovine TB will carry on increasing until someone listens. Even the government believe that the main source of bovine TB is cattle to cattle, yet the killing goes on!
The Government hides behind their policy of a long-term protracted lie, which misinforms the public.
When cattle were cooped up for longer periods (than 'normal') like during the FMD outbreak, low levels of the disease were amplified in herds. Now cattle have being sold and moved - without any TB testing, spreading the disease to new places.
An example of that scapegoating is that farmers and farming unions have been blaming badgers for the decline in skylarks for years. But in a briefing paper to the Government TB Forum in May 2002, Dr Chris Cheeseman from DEFRA's Ecological Research Unit, confirmed that cattle are responsible for 60% of nest destruction’s.
In contrast, badgers and foxes are responsible for just 15% of destructions. Most significantly, Dr Cheeseman confirmed that intensive grazing regimes increase the likelihood of nest destruction.
Dr Cheeseman also rebuked farming unions for claiming that badger numbers are “exploding”. He also confirmed that no evidence has been found to link an increase in the badger population to the increase in bovine TB in cattle.
Cattle should be more frequently tested for bovine TB. Cattle should be tested before being moved or sold and cattle movements from TB areas into 'clean' areas of Britain should be restricted.
DEFRA appears to be making little or no effort to record the illegal killing of badgers - in trial areas or elsewhere. This is despite evidence - from the police and others that farmers are killing badgers in TB areas. In addition, Professor Bourne has expressed his concern to badger groups that the illegal killing is "sinister".
Ecological Impact - The effect of killing badgers over a 2000 km² plus area has not been studied. In fact the government/DEFRA refused to do an independent environmental impact study into the cull and pressed on regardless.
What will be the effect of the local extinction of badgers? Especially in Devon where a Reactive area and two Proactive areas are adjacent to each other: North Devon - Proactive, East Cornwall - Reactive - Mid Devon - Proactive.
THE WAY FORWARD - Cattle TB control? In textbooks, bovine TB is simply a slow but progressive bronchopneumonia, hence:
A - If unchecked, TB spreads slowly but inexorably at three levels:
Individual - The initial lung lesion/s grow and spawn secondary lesions in the lungs, then kidneys, uterus, udder, etc. The older the animal the more advanced the TB is in size/number of lesions, test positivity, infectiousness: few bacilli shed intermittently, then with multiple gross lesions up to 38 million/day.
Population - 1. Within herds, 2. Local clusters of herds, 3. Distant herd via missed carrier, producing 'new' hotspot cluster... clusters grow and merge eventually.
Respiratory - spread via aerosolised sputum, just like human colds, flu, TB and other cattle 'pneumonia’s' (Viral RSV, Bacterial Pasteurella, etc and mycoplasmal).
B - The two checks are determined by the long incubation of the disease:
Annual testing - On 'average' it takes about 2 months to become a reactor (8-65 days) then about a year to reach the more infectious visible lesion stage.
Movement ban - Apart from false positives, this latency is party why the test is only 80% accurate (68% on retests) so a movement ban is the only guaranteed way of preventing spread to TB-free areas. Less useful is sourcing from 'allegedly' TB-free areas, pre-movement tests, or post-movement tests which can never be better than catch-up. Restocking without movement ban/testing has already taken TB to areas TB-free for up to 50 years: Powys, Dumfries, Ayr, Cumbria, Northumberland, Durham, and Yorks. Leics. And Sussex.
C - Widely overlooked is why annual testing is the gold standard world-wide and under EC directives, but has three critical impacts on TB control:
Minimising spread - Reactors are removed at the early lesion stage before they can pass on TB to any extent, both within the herd and in sold on cattle. Both factors apply to contiguous or bought-in cattle in local or distant herds, (if these are on longer test intervals, TB will simply build up within the herd). Some breakdowns are now 60% of the herd affected.
Respiratory spread - The microscopic NVL lesion(s) are almost 100% in the lungs or lymph nodes associated with the respiratory tract, these early lesions show spread by inhalation.
Demographic - After some years of annual testing older TB cattle are removed, so the ongoing problem is confined to younger cattle.
The whole national cattle herd has to be tested just to find out where TB has got to?
The 'official' backlog of tests is causing problems and until there have been several years of annual testing in hotspots are needed to even begin to bring the spread under control. It is absurd that it is taking some 53-320 days to remove reactors!
It’s even more absurd that this government is ignoring all the evidence and is now planning mass murder of these precious creatures!
disgracefull.