Good news – the government has finally decided to listen to the evidence and put a stop to plans to roll out the badger cull.
The pilot culls in Somerset and Gloucestershire aimed to see:
- if culling using free shooting could kill enough badgers 70%) to reduce bovine TB
- if it was a humane way of killing badgers
- if it was safe
My previous blog post on the evidence for and against the cull discusses this. Suffice it to say, the pilot culls failed miserably on the first two criteria. It’s only success was that no-one was hurt.
Despite the overwhelming evidence on the failure of the pilot culls, the high costs and widespread public and political opposition to them, it was by no means certain that the government would pull the plug on the idea of rolling them out. The National Farmers Union have continued to push for them. But we now know they won’t be expanded to new areas.
The government have also announced a programme of vaccinating badgers around the edges of areas with high levels of bovine TB.
It’s not all good news for badgers, though. Culling of badgers in the pilot cull zones will be allowed to continue, with no monitoring. This seems bizarre, given the pilots found that closely scrutinised free shooting was inhumane. Unmonitored killing is hardly likely to be more humane. Obviously that no longer matters…
The culls have, from the start, been more about politics than evidence. I have no doubt that the decision not to expand the cull is mainly due to the campaigns against it, rather than whether the cull was likely to reduce bovine TB. Well done to all who campaigned against the cull, and the activists who monitored the cull.
Wild South 
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