Hope for Welsh badgers facing cull

Tuesday, 16 February 2010 15:08

Thousands of badgers in Wales face being killed under orders of the Welsh Assembly in a highly controversial and misguided attempt to reduce the incidence of Bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in dairy cattle. However a legal challenge may thwart the Assembly’s cull plans.

 bTB is a disease that can be transmitted from wild badgers to cattle. Cattle infected with bTB face serious health and welfare problems and as a result are slaughtered, financially impacting on farmers. UK governments have tested various means of badger culling to control bTB infection in cattle over the past 30 years. After reviewing the results of a trial badger cull in England the UK Government decided in 2008 against further killing.

However, the Welsh Assembly Government has proposed to implement a badger cull using methods very similar to those used in the English culling trial. The planned slaughter contradicts a wealth of evidence showing that culling badgers is unlikely to result in a long-term decrease in TB in cattle - in fact it may even make matters worse.

The most recent evidence - published only last week by Imperial College London and the Zoological Society of London - found that "badger culling is unlikely to be a cost-effective way of helping control cattle TB in Britain", and "the benefits of repeated widespread badger culling, in terms of reducing the incidence of cattle TB, disappear within four years after the culling has ended".

This new research also suggests reducing bTB infections would be two to three times less expensive that the cost of repeated badger culls.

A Judicial Review of the Assembly's cull plan will take place at the end of March and if successful could stop this unnecessary slaughter from going ahead.