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UK - Bovine TB and Badgers (Gassing !!)

This article clearly advocating the gassing of badgers ...... portrayed here to be a good thing !!!! Propaganda.

MEAT TRADE NEWS DAILY UK
18 Nov 2010

It will be 35 years ago this month that I had my first direct experience of bovine TB and badgers.

I had just been appointed Regional Information Officer for the NFU, and one of my first assignments was to visit a farmer called Ron Cranton, at Steeple Leaze Farm near Swanage in Dorset.

The farm looked a picture in the crisp winter sunshine, pasture fields running down from hillsides to the sea.

Ron was waiting for us in the handsome ham-stone farmhouse.

We found him slumped in a chair in the kitchen, with his head in his hands.

He had lost 700 cattle to TB in the previous three years, and was a broken man.

But we brought with us some encouraging news. Maff had traced the source of the infection which was killing his cattle to badgers coming on to his land from the military ranges that surrounded it on three sides.

Not only that, but they had decided to eradicate the infection, bygassingevery sett within range of the farm, and keeping the area clear of badgers for the ensuing five years.

I wouldn't say that we left Ron a happy man, but he did at least have hope.

Sure enough, over the next couple of years, the badgers were cleared, and with them the disease.

From the time when the last sett was filled in to the day the Cranton family decided to sell the cows and put the farm down to corn, they suffered not a single TB breakdown. And when Maff allowed the badgers to re-colonise the surrounding land, those badgers remained disease-free, as well.

Now, the key to the success of this operation, and of similar ones at Thornbury and around Hartland, was the use of gassing, because it enabled an infected area to be cleared quickly, thoroughly and, it was presumed, humanely, of badgers known to be carrying disease. By 1980, the number of new outbreaks had been reduced to fewer than 100. TB was on the run. Final eradication was in sight.

But then the animal welfare lobby put its oar in, questioning whethergassingwas, in fact, humane. Lord Zuckerman was asked by the Government of the day to examine the evidence and he decided that some badgers in the furthest recesses of large setts, might not be killed by thegas, and might instead waste slowly away from starvation.

So, in the name of badger welfare,gassingwas banned, and from being on the point of winning the war against TB, we started to lose it. Each change in Government policy from there on made the situation worse, to be sure, but it was the ban ongassing

that started the rot. The result has been, in the intervening 30 years or so, that hundreds of thousands, possibly even millions, of badgers that would otherwise have lived healthy lives have got sick, died or been killed.The quantum of wild animal suffering has been increased beyond measure by that one, well-intentioned, but oh so horribly misguided decision.

If ever there was an example of how being kind can sometimes be terribly cruel, then this was it.

Still, we are where we are, and the Government's consultation on a farmer- funded and executed badger cull does provide just a glimmer of the same sort of hope that turned the situation round for Ron Cranton all those years ago. What is on offer is very far from ideal and will be expensive.

Michael Hart, of the Small and Family Farmers' Association, reckons that the five-year cost of running a 150 sq km culling zone will be a minimum of £1.63 million. Spread over 150 farmers, that works out at £10,000 each.

But then a report commissioned by the NFU and others from the Centre of Rural Research at the University of Exeter has worked out that the average uncompensated cost of a TB breakdown is just under £25,000, so for some, the financial equation will work. Besides, as I have written before, in the final analysis it must and should be farmers themselves who decide whether a cull is worth it. But to be able to make that decision – to have that choice – there has to be a positive response to the consultation.

With the RSPCA, the IFAW and the Badger Trust whipping up their supporters to oppose a cull, it becomes more important than ever that, for once in their lives, farmers themselves respond, and don't leave it all to the NFU and the CLA.

In the meantime, Dianne Summers and her colleagues in the Alpaca TB Support Group are to be congratulated first for their honesty in admitting the extent to which the disease has spread through the alpaca population – 35 outbreaks to date – and second for the quality of their website www.alpacatb.org which both raises awareness of the problem and offers much sensible advice.

One can but hope that a similar website doesn't become necessary for pigs, given the worrying spread of TB in that species, in outdoor herds especially.

thisissomerset

Source: newsroom - meattradenewsdaily.co.uk

 

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