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.