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Farmers should abandon TB hot spots - Brian May

FARMERS GUARDIAN
4 April 2011 | By Alistair Driver
ROCK star and animal rights campaigner Brian May has provoked anger among Welsh farmers by suggesting they should move cattle out of bovine TB hotspot areas.

Dr May has been campaigning vigorously against badger culling over the past year and was in Cardiff last week to attend the Welsh Assembly debate on the failed attempt to annul legislation permitting a cull in west Wales.

Comments made to Farmers Guardian after the debate will do little to enhance his credibility among farmers, however.

“TB hotspots are clearly defined so why are taxpayers paying millions of pounds in compensation when farmers continue in this foolhardy way to raise cattle in these areas where they are obviously going to get sick for whatever reason. Why do we put up with this? Why don’t farmers raise cattle some place else?” he said.

The Queen guitarist denied he was suggesting farmers should be eradicated from parts of Britain but added: “I am talking about being sensitive about where you do your farming. Farmers are having a terrible time, experiencing shut downs and misery, because they fail to see they are trying to something in the wrong place. If I was a cattle farmer, I would not raise my cattle in a TB hotspot.”

He admitted the cards were ‘stacked against’ opponents of the badger cull in Wales because of what he described as the ‘overwhelming control’ of the farming industry over the Assembly.

But he insisted he would ‘continue the fight’ and said he would consider helping to fund any legal action to try and halt the culling in Wales.

He said badger culling was a ‘deeply flawed’ policy that could make matters worse, as shown by the conclusions of the 2007 Independent Scientific Group report, and that vaccination, which he claimed had been shown to work , was the ‘only hope.’

“I know that we have no right to be killing these innocent creatures because of our own deficiencies in farming practice. I know this is wrong as sure as I know slavery is wrong,” he said.

“I hope enlightenment spreads through the farming community before the fields of Wales are running with the blood of these creatures,” he said.

The Farmers Union of Wales (FUW) condemned the comments. FUW TB spokesman Brian Walters said Dr May had ‘once again shown contempt for and complete ignorance of Welsh rural life’.

He said the ‘ridiculous idea’ that farmers should stop farming in TB hotspot areas and ‘run away from a disease problem rather than tackling it’ would have a ‘severe impact’ on the environment, culture and economy of those places.

“Banning farmers from doing what they have done for thousands of years is like banning Brian May from playing the guitar - some people might like the idea but it’s pretty obvious to people with an ounce of commonsense that it’s a ridiculous and offensive proposition,” Mr Walters said.

“It’s one step away from forcibly removing people from the land they have farmed for generations and putting them in camps, just to save a few thousand wild animals which are nowhere near being endangered.

He said it was people like Dr May who campaigned against badger culling that ‘led directly to the huge explosion in badger numbers from 1970s onwards’.

“Now that they have become a massive disease reservoir he wants farmers to stop keeping cattle? The audacity of the man fathoms belief,” he said.

“Brian May should stick to playing the guitar, rather than speaking about things which happen in a different country which he doesn’t understand and do not affect him.”

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