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Badger cull - Rolling back the years...

BIOCENSUS NEWSLETTER
17 Sept 2010 - Tim Hounsome

UK government announces new badger control policy: Is this the perfect recipe for making things worse or a regressive policy designed to placate farmers, cost nothing and achieve nothing?

On September 15th, Defra published their consultation document on:  Bovine Tuberculosis: The Government’s approach to tackling the disease and consultation on a badger control policy. As you can imagine, this is a highly controversial, emotive, and relevant issue and I intend to dedicate the whole of this month’s newsletter to talking about it.

It is, and always will be, a political football. Although the issue is portrayed in the media as relatively straight forward, it is actually incredibly complicated and needs long term, joined up thinking. Not something our political system is very well adapted to. I worked as a government researcher in this field for nine years before heading into Ecological consultancy, and the most frustrating aspect of this latest policy is the fact that it has largely ignored 30 years of research.

Shortly after bovine TB was first identified in badgers in the mid seventies, the government policy was to cull badgers by shooting or gassing on farms with herd breakdowns. For welfare reasons gassing was stopped and replaced by cage trapping and shooting. This lasted up until 1997.  Despite these efforts, levels of TB in cattle and badgers continued to increase.  Concern over the effectiveness of culling led to a large scale field experiment, which after great expense and intense peer review concluded that ‘badger culling can make no meaningful contribution to cattle TB control in Britain”.  The policy put forward in the government’s consultation document yesterday is the equivalent of turning the clock back several decades.

The complexities of years of TB research are too extensive for me to cover here (numerous PhDs have been written on the subject), but one behavioural response is central to this debate, perturbation. Badgers are territorial and, in moderate to high-density populations, they maintain fairly stable group territories. However, if you remove some of the badgers from a territory, then this stable situation can deteriorate and, for a time, there can be an increase in the amount of movement and territorial disputes. Scientific evidence has shown that this disruption can increase the incidence of bovine TB in badgers and cattle. This is called the “Perturbation effect”.  This mechanism is often cited as a reason why previous government strategies in the 80’s and 90’s, not only failed to work but actually made things worse. In 1997 the Krebs review identified the need for an experimental trial to once and for all establish whether badger culling could reduce levels of TB in cattle. The results of the trial were complicated, but in a nutshell they showed that culling badgers over a large area (100km²) resulted in a 25% drop in herd breakdowns within the core of the area, but this was matched by a 25% increase at the periphery.  Evidence of territorial disruption in the wake of the culling suggested that perturbation was to blame.

The consultation document published yesterday suggests that groups of farmers club together to apply for licences to cull badgers by trapping and shooting and/or free shooting. A minimum area of 150km² with at least 70% compliance is required. One could argue that this might work if it employed the same level of effort and operational rigour of the culling trial (although this would cost approx. £2.1 million). But this is unlikely to be the case. In all likelihood it will be a piecemeal and patchy approach with highly variable levels of effort. My concern is that this policy could be the ideal recipe for ‘perturbation’.

This new policy comes hot on the heels of the government scrapping a previous initiative to roll out vaccination of badgers across large areas of England. This initiative represented a new and enlightened approach to Ecologists working in the field. But the frustration at the regressive nature of the latest policy makes many feel that the research of the last 30 years has been ignored.

Certain individuals and groups are taking a stand and putting their money where their mouth is. Someone who deserves a special mention is Dr Gordon McGlone OBE of The Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust. The Trust is committed to a vaccination program on their land with a view to encouraging farmers in the region to do the same. Let’s hope more organisations follow their exemplary lead!

The public consultation on this issue is going on now and ends on the 8thof December 2010. If you would like to have your opinion heard click this link which will take you to the Defra site where you can read more about the debate and join in.

My final point today is that this news letter is an opinion piece of one scientist. As an objective scientist I would encourage everyone to study the evidence and to make up their own minds on this issue.

 

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