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

[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.