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British badger culling plans stagger on

ROSIE WOODROFFE comments to Nature.com.

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July 19, 2011

A scientifically and politically controversial cull of badgers in England will initially be allowed only in two pilot areas, the UK’s environment secretary Caroline Spelman announced today.

Badgers can carry the bovine TB virus, and farmers have long pushed for a widespread cull of the animals, in the belief it will reduce disease outbreaks in their herds.

Spelman said she was “strongly minded” to allow a “science-led” cull in areas worst affected by bovine tuberculosis. Further consultation will be undertaken on the implementation of the proposals, which will then go ahead in two areas and, crucially, rely on shooting free roaming badgers.

How ‘science-led’ the government’s policy on badger culling and bovine-TB actually is has been a fraught topic recently. There is some evidence from the government-funded Randomised Badger Culling Trial that carefully controlled culling can reduce the disease in a defined area. However, it can also backfire if infected badgers are disturbed and leave their territories due to ineffective culling, spreading the disease as they move (‘perturbation’).

Speaking to Nature today, Rosie Woodroffe, a researcher at the Institute of Zoology and one of those behind the RBCT, has this to say about the claim that the proposal was science led: “I can’t really see that that’s true.”

The randomised trial used highly trained specialists, whereas the government is proposing licensing farmers to kill the badgers themselves. This, says Woodroffe, will make it harder to coordinate a rapid and comprehensive cull over the entire area, something that is vital in minimising ‘perturbation’.

“One of my major concerns is this seems to be a massively costly distraction from dealing with the problem,” she says.

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Bovine TB has “an enormous and terrible impact on farmers' livelihoods” and this proposal may be “asking them to waste their money” on something unlikely to work.

Under the government proposals farmers themselves would pay for the culling. Although today’s announcement has been welcomed by the National Farmers Union, according to the government’s own cost-benefit analysis this culling method would actually cost farmers money.

The analysis – which admits to “considerable uncertainties around the central estimates” - puts the costs for farmers in the culling area at £1.38 million and the benefits to those farmers at £1.32m. Farmers in neighbouring areas will see costs of £0.11m and benefits of £0.04m.

The government expects its own costs to be £1.02m, with £2.94m of benefits.

Image: photo by Lance Fisher via Flickr under creative commons.

Box: information from DEFRA.

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