The King Report on Badger Culling

[andygates]

The King report is here: http://www.defra.gov.uk/animalh/tb/pdf/badgersreport-king.pdf

Basically, it's an attempt at a stopgap. Kill enough badgers to decrease the "reservoir of infection" and maintain the cull until something better (like badger vaccination or -gasp- better farming practices) comes along. It won't be a one-off and to work it would need to be repeated year after year in cull areas.

The smart, long-term approach would be to tag badgers now, get a really good idea of their movements and meanwhile expedite vaccine development. Then routinely vaccinate until the "reservoir of infection" is emptied. This would be cheaper in the long term, it would be massively more acceptable to the public, and it would be more effective.

I hope we can keep the anger level high enough that the politicians see that this is a vote-loser. That might steer them in the right direction. Very unpopular cull programmes would probably result in direct-action badger defense protests and a whole wave of "swampy versus the farmers" protest, which would be less desirable but an understandable reaction.

Comments

[gedhrel.livejournal.com]

What's to say that the process failures (and inevitability) that lead to human xdrtb won't do the same for the bovine form? Doesn't seem likely that you'd ever be able to do a whole-population vaccination in animals as hard to get down to the local GP as badgers, so I'm not clear how vaccination helps do anything but shift the target.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Good point that, though there is a threshold level of vaccination at which the infected population is sufficiently dispersed to break the endemic status of the disease. There's a big flap right now over human measles and this: the inoculation level fell below the threshold as a result of the MMR scare, and so the disease is getting a foothold in the population once more.

Of course this won't work if the GP-shy badgers are exposed to a constant reservoir of infection from cattle herds. The irony.

The ISG report concluded that culling wasn't financially viable; vaccination is probably going to be more expensive. I can't see it being cheaper.

[flitljm.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link. I have a problem with the premise that wildlife is less important than dairy farming; and that there's no attempt at evaluating the impacts of badger removal on the rest of the ecosystem over these very large areas.

So long as we continue to farm cattle, the priority has to be developing a vaccine for them (vaccinating badgers would be a very expensive alternative).

I know one of the people at Defra involved in organising badger culls and have every sympathy with civil servants, in their own view trying to serve rural communities, and worried about animal rights activists if anyone finds out.

I also know people in local badger groups and wildlife trusts who are likely to be very unhappy indeed.

On the political side, I think its telling that David King is allowed to override the opinion of the experts commissioned to work on this over the last decade or so, who said that "badger culling cannot meaningfully contribute to the control of cattle TB in Britain". King is asking for further analysis to disprove their conclusion, but making his own radical conclusions ahead of this further analysis being undertaken. Someone up top has already made up their mind.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

The ecological assessment would surely have to be done: there would be huge pressure for that. Badgers are a top predator, and I'd hate to see them replaced by, say, mink. Hasn't ecology science since about the 1970s shown that you mess with top predators at your peril?

Defra staff are probably right to be concerned.

King's position was explained a little in this evening's R4 news; during the BSE flap he overrode the finding that BSE was in sheep. It *wasn't* in sheep (there was a cockup at the lab), and for saving the day he seems to have earned special status. He's also quite a bulldog in debate. But it does utterly stink of political interference, doesn't it? Give the farmers what they want regardless of what is right.

[simoneck.livejournal.com]

Heard some interviews around this.
Apparently it's a very large area now, so you are talking 200,000 badgers.

Also, when you kill badgers, other badgers start to move much more widely, since there is territory for them to move into. Thus you get much more movement when you do the culling.

Can't see it makes any sense at all.


Though I've never heard any details on what impact TB has on badgers. Is it just a bit inconvenient, or do they die a horrible and lingering death. ie is there a good reason to cull badgers to stop other badgers getting TB. If this was the case, I'm guessing it would be being used as an argument.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

They die a horrible and lingering death. I'd support measures which tried to reduce the rate of infection in the wild population, but these don't - they just seem to reduce the numbers, and hope that will do the job. As soon as the population stops being suppressed, we'll be back to square one. And in the meantime, badgers and lady badgers will still hook up: they'll just have to travel further to do it.

The wildlife-welfare card has not been played as far as I can see. Instead it's the "lovely but lethal! Look, they're just huge plague rats!" angle at the mo.

[flitljm.livejournal.com]

Nature editorial supportive of original committee
(ask me if you can't see it)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v450/n7166/full/450001b.html

[andygates.livejournal.com]

The scientific community's not very impressed with being spun, is it?