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Farmers and badger fans draw battlelines over cull (RECOMMENDED READ)

Excellent essay by Tom Baldwin.... an essential read.  Welcome common sense.

THE TIMES
18 Sept 2010
Tom Baldwin

The last time that a wider badger cull was proposed it provoked angry protests

In the farm office of a barn in Gloucestershire is a toy badger, the kind of gift that might be given to a child who has read The Wind in the Willows. This one, however, dangles on the end of a rope with a noose tied around its neck.

Rob Costello, the herdsman at Whalley Farm in Whittington, clearly does not feel too sentimental about a creature portrayed in such human terms by Kenneth Grahame and Beatrix Potter but which he regards as nothing more than disease-spreading vermin.

But he does love his cows and has just discovered that yet another will have to be destroyed because it has bovine tuberculosis. Mr Costello is clearly upset as he puts the blame squarely on “those low-life badgers”, adding: “This really rattles my cage, it does.”

After more than a decade in which Labour refused to allow badger culling except for scientific research, the Government announced this week plans to grant licences for shooting — if not lynching — thousands of the animals each year.

About 5,000 badgers are likely to be killed in the first 12 months of the cull, which will begin, after a public consultation, next year in the West and South West. Jim Paice, the Agriculture Minister, who is himself a former farm manager, is keen to demonstrate that Conservatives understand rural needs in a way that Labour perhaps did not.

Mr Paice said that farmers had told him that they were “desperate to do this” and had convinced him that the measure was necessary to stop the spread of a disease that last year caused the slaughter of 25,000 cattle in England.

Even he acknowledged, however, that it was “unfortunate for us” that this meant culling “an animal that’s iconic in British countryside”.

When the last government launched a public consultation over culling badgers it was overwhelmed by 47,000 responses, of which 95 per cent were opposed.

Farmers may attribute this to the anthropomorphic meddling of children’s literature, but badgers do seem to stir peculiar earthy passions.

By no means rare — there are around 400,000 of them in Britain — they are little seen, emerging under cover of darkness from a secret subterranean world into a landscape that too often seems stripped of wildness. Malcolm Clark, of Wiltshire Badger Group, describes how they have “a certain mystique about them”.

He says: “I fell in love with badgers when I discovered there was a sett in the paddock of my old house. I was fascinated and felt drawn to them — it just grew from there.”

Mr Clark dedicates almost half his working week to acting as a “badger consultant” while his wife, Sue, even used to keep one in an understairs cupboard at home because it suffered from a bad back.

“We had Willow living with us for three years,” she says, wearing a belt with the word “vegan” displayed prominently on the buckle. “He was lovely, very unassuming.”

But Mr Clark insists “we’re not badger huggers” and that the argument against culling is “based on sound science rather than sentiment”. He points out how extensive trials conducted by the last government found that disturbing badger groups caused them to become more infectious, as well as to wander a wider area.

The 1998 Bourne Report concluded that while badgers were “clearly a source” of TB in cattle, culling would make “no meaningful contribution” to the control of the disease in Britain and might even make matter worse.

“Farmers know how to produce milk and meat,” says Mr Clark, “but they don’t really know about disease control and they’re not scientists.” He believes that TB is transmitted mostly cow-to-cow and that farmers are looking for scapegoats for their intensive modern agricultural techniques which incubate disease.

Back at Whalley Farm, its owner explains how TB infections — which he blames entirely on the uncontrolled badger population — have cost him as much as £300,000 in recent years.

Jan Rowe, 65, says: “We’ve had TB on the farm since 1986 but it’s got really bad in the last decade, when we’ve only had one year when we were free of it and allowed to buy and sell live cattle.

“Our hands have been tied behind our backs by the bureaucrats who have made badgers one of the most protected animals in the northern hemisphere. It got worse with Labour because they were an urban government which did not understand the countryside and clearly very reluctant to cull. But like foxes and all sorts of other vermin, we have to keep badgers under control.”

Mr Rowe, a second-generation farmer who is now planning to quit his TB-damaged family business, makes no effort to conceal his disdain for The Wind in the Willows myth.

“Badgers are vicious predators with the second most powerful bite in the animal kingdom. I’ve even seen one take a bit out of an aluminium grain shovel,” he says.

“They are also mammalian JCBs who do hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of damage to this country every year. They dig into building, rivers, roads, railways, and ask archeologists what they think — they absolutely hate them!”

But, with a sigh, he then concedes there will be a problem with public opinion when the culling begins, saying: “People think they are these cuddly, docile little animals, don’t they?”

Mr Clark warns that some animals rights activists may take direct action as they did during culling trials for the Bourne Report when a number of traps were smashed or removed. “I never did that,” he says with a faint smile, “but there are undoubtedly some who would. This will upset a lot of people.

“It will become an exceptionally hot political issue. I think there will be protests, although it will be hard to know where they’re doing the killing until it begins. Some people may try to protect certain setts.

”Ministers may yet have reason to regret a decision they made in June to cancel five of the six trials taking place on the use of TB vaccines for badgers, the preferred policy of the previous government.

As ever these days, it appears deficit reduction was at least part of the reason, with officials saying that shooting badgers is 10 times cheaper than vaccinating them.But as Tony Blair belatedly discovered over foxhunting, debates about wildlife and the countryside often become precariously unpredictable. Politicians, be they Tory or Labour, should tread warily when they venture into the undergrowth and the deep dark where the wild things are.

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