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PRESS STATEMENT: Shoot badgers and kill tourism

THE BADGER TRUST
3 May 2011

Peter Kendall, President of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU), spectacularly misses the point about the impact on tourism of shooting free-running badgers. He wrote in The Guardian on April 27 that there was no reason to expect that experienced marksmen carrying out the “control operation” on private land at night would discourage people from visiting the countryside.

Mr Kendall confuses the public’s massive public disapproval of the policy of slaughtering badgers with the method employed. He blandly assumes that killing badgers out of sight on private land would be out of the minds of holidaymakers. The Badger Trust says the public has shown in consultations in both England and Wales that is not as credulous as Mr Kendall seems to think.

Mr Kendall also believes that the industry’s mercenaries would be “fully-trained in badger control”. This is a worthless assertion because shooting free-running badgers at night has never been tried except by criminals and remains a danger to the public.

Mr Kendall’s remarks are purely political spin to support a long-held and futile prejudice that killing badgers could make a meaningful contribution to saving money for his members. In fact the industry could be handed a big bill for the privilege of shooting itself in the foot as well as destroying badgers.

The steady reduction of 15 percent in the number of cattle slaughtered through bovine tuberculosis during the last two years must be acknowledged as a significant demonstration that control is perfectly possible, as in the past, without killing badgers. And of course there will be many who will argue that those improved results would be even more striking had it not been for recently well publicised breaches of critically important TB regulations the extent of which have yet to become clear.

Jack Reedy
THE BADGER TRUST


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