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TOP WORLD AUTHORITY CONDEMNS BADGER CULL

 

PRESS RELEASE FROM THE BADGER TRUST
12 July 2011

The Badger Trust applauds Lord Krebs, the architect of the 10-year Randomised Badger Culling Trial for his sound advice to the Coalition Government: "To me the story is pretty straightforward. If you’ve got a measure that affects 15 percent of the problem, then you don’t focus on that. You focus on something else." [1]

The next few days will bring D-day for the official killing of badgers –Death-day – and Ministers should not ignore Lord Krebs as it has ignored many other internationally recognised scientists in following a strident and misguided cattle industry lobby.

Lord Krebs, now Principal of Jesus College, Oxford and Chairman of the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee said: "The trial evidence should be interpreted as an argument against culling. "You cull intensively for at least four years, you will have a net benefit of reducing TB in cattle of 12% to 16%. So you leave 85% of the problem still there, having gone to a huge amount of trouble to kill a huge number of badgers. It doesn't seem to be an effective way of controlling the disease".

He added that a better option would be to try to develop a vaccine in the long term, and in the short term to use better biosecurity measures to prevent cattle from coming into contact with badgers and other sources of the disease, and to prevent them passing it to each other." [2]

David Williams, Chairman of the Badger Trust said: "Isn’t it time to stop the wrangling and listen to the science? The farmers say they want healthy cattle and healthy wildlife – that is what we also want, no more and no less. Killing badgers is never going to have a significant role in eradicating bovine tuberculosis (bTB). The farming industry, government and organisations such as ourselves should be working together to solve the problem.

"We know that adherence to the testing regime and improvements in bio-security can themselves make a significant difference. However, an unreliable test is still being used. An injectable vaccine is already available and by next month the Trust will have sent six people on the official Defra training course and we are committed to the introduction of a vaccination project.

Rather than killing thousands of badgers (on average six out of seven will be disease-free) common sense must prevail. We very much hope that we shall not be obliged to challenge the legality of any decision to cull and anticipate that public anger will be on a par with the outrage expressed over the proposal to sell off the forests.

"We would far rather put our time, money and resources to better use and follow Lord Krebs’ advice to focus on 85 per cent of the problem."

Jack Reedy, Media Advisor
THE BADGER TRUST 

[1] Independent 12th July 2011

[2] Guardian 11th July 2011

 

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