Bedd Gelert snuck in a little note on the failed proposal for a Welsh badger cull to Lord Norton’s last so I thought I’d take this opportunity to respond. I have more the average fondness for badgers because I once played one! The role of Badger in Wind in the Willows was my first starring role in school dramatics and since then I’ve felt singularly sympathetic to these nocturnal secretive creatures.
But badgers are vermin. They are not an endangered species. The population of badgers is thought to have increased by 70% or more in the past twenty years and no-one now disputes that they carry the TB which passes to cattle. There isn’t much doubt that a total extermination of badgers over a wide area, combined with restriction of movement of cattle and better biosecurity on farms would help eradicate the destructive TB in cattle. Cattle movement from infected areas to clean farms is by far the best predictor of bovine TB distribution on a national level so farmers have a job to do to ensure movements are controlled.
Culling of badgers in the vicinity of recent TB outbreaks in cattle has failed to reduce the overall incidence of cattle TB. Data from a large-scale study conducted in 1998–2005 showed that badgers collected on localized culls had an elevated prevalence of Mycobacterium bovis, the causative agent of bovine TB but the conclusion is that reduction in badger numbers won’t do the trick, you need total removal of the badger population over a wide area and so far no-one has managed to achieve that for practical reasons. We probably need to develop a means to stop badgers breeding, a contraceptive pill for badgers? I would support a cull in Wales and anywhere else if we could be absolutely sure it would be total.
But there is some modest comfort to be taken from the government investment in developing a TB cattle vaccine, which as Lord Krebs said in his report in 1997 “is the best prospect for control of TB in the British herd”. Total investment (since 1998) in vaccine development reached more than £17.8 million by the end of March 2008. Over £5.5 million was invested in cattle and badger vaccine research in 2007/2008. Real progress has been made. Testing candidate vaccines in naturally infected cattle and badgers, and developing novel vaccine delivery systems, is underway. Meanwhile, badger huggers can be as sentimental as they like and farmers will remain angry.
And after the eradication of the Badger species and the possible continuance of Bovine TB then what ?
I am not a bunny hugger but nor am I a human hugger the most parasitical and destructive species there is on this planet. The ease with which some people sanction murderous action albeit against another species worries me. What perhaps of the future if sections of humans were spreading disease, would they sanction their slaughter ?
£17.8 million in vaccine development since 1998 compared with the proposed £82 million to be spent on a referendum puts things in perspective. The priorities of Government seem all wrong which perhaps is not unusual since Governments number one priority has always seemed itself.
We have to learn to co-exist with other species that are essential to the planet, their problems are also ours. There will of course be times of culling as will come a time we seek enforced contraception in our species.
The legal dispute in Wales is caused by implemented law not being consise and clear but no one is suggesting a cull of Parliament whose feet at we can lay the blame.
There are of course tough decisions to be made for our species and others but co-existence and balance is a necessity. Our intelligence put us at the top of the food chain but it is of no consequence if it allows us to charge head first into suicidal actions by changing the planet into something on which we cannot survive.
Eradication of the British bear and wolf has seen changes to our countryside, the deer for instance now has to be culled by man. We are altering the very shape of our ecological system and we must be fully aware of ALL the cosequences before we act in future. Kneejerk reactions are not the answer, careful thought and consideration are.
A future worry maybe the fox population of our cities which appears to be growing at an alarming rate. The bug, cockroach situation in our inner cities, the mice and rats and so on….All possibly created by us and our eradication of their natural predators and the way we have chosen to live.
The biggest threat to mankind and that which creates the greatest suffering in our kin is mankind itself. Our Government/it`s actions has killed 320 young fit healthy men of our land in Afghanistan yet no cull of Parliament has been proposed. Certainly no one from our Government would state aloud that it is in an attempt at the ethnic cleansing of the Taliban, a name seemingly used by Western Governments to cover loosely based groups of freedom fighters and terrorists together.
Badgers are not attacking humans or their cattle Mycobacterium bovis is, lets deal with the problem at source.
I`d ike to make clear that the Cull was ordered by the Welsh Assembly and not UK Parliament as such. The judgement stating :
“Lord Justice Pill said the assembly government was wrong to make an order for the whole of Wales when it consulted on the basis of a Intensive Action Pilot Area (IAPA) which only supported a cull on evidence within the IAPA.”
With devolution it is becoming harder to know who is to blame, the Welsh Assembly, UK Parliament or ultimately the EU whose Courts have the ability, it seem`s, to overrule anything.
You claim that “badgers are vermin”.
Certain other experts claim that fish are expendable, that many species of the various Biological Kingdoms on Earth are extinctable.
Indeed it is clear that the vast majority of both Governments and Peoples around the World think that whole-life-habitats are destructible.
A Reading in the 26-weeks Environmental Studies course of the Australian Open Universities course shows how we The Human Race has long since become a Plague upon this otherwise majorly life-supportive Earth.
It might be more reasonable therefore to begin ‘culling’ over-costly humans ?
Many would have no problem with working that pleasantly-humane task (before it is too late) from the Super-super-costly Top Life-Usurpery downwards, at a more or less comfortably-frugal cruising-speed, until reaching the near-embarrassing numbers of life-efficient ‘making-ends-meet-on-one-human-living-per-week of £200 at which point Earthlife will most probably have to go on totally-without any humans whatsoever, my lady.
Might it be wildly possible that before such humane-human-culling can begin (or end) someone will have earned a billion-a-year and a Nobel prize or two for finding out how to best re-settle all the badger populations into a safely enclosed and healthy place such an island of badger-farms ?
Surely there’d be as much usefulness derivable from farming badgers as there would from buying up all of Afghanistan’s drug poppy crops for Western controlled medical purposes, or rapidly reducing and extincting all Life with continuing CFCs, Chemical-toxins, Oil-spills, Deforestations, Soil-degradations, and Overkill after Overkill ?
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JSDM1459St170710)
A “Cull” being a calculated “Kill”.
There have been so many differing stats on the subject I do not know which to accept.
Vast numbers were being killed on the road round here and if their loyalty to their mates is a guide they are fine animals indeed.
I have seen the mate of a squashed Badger licking the entrails of its dead partner in mourning beside the road.
I wonder whether the learnéd baroness has considered what proportion of the dairy cattle/cow population is now kept in BATTERY captivity in the same way as Chickens are, and what proportion of the milk on the S-m shelves is produced from those battery cows?
The pricing policy of the S-ms is no guide at all to the value either of the organic rearing of the livestock or the quality of the milk.
Where do badgers come in to contact with Dairy herds today? THERE ARE VERY FEW DAIRY HERDS LEFT IN THE OPEN AIR!
The Campaign cause that the noble baroness
supports can ONLY be a way of justifying battery cows in the same way that Battery hens were justified in the 1950s.
How far have we come with battery hens and back again and do we have to go through the same agonizing with cows in Battery as we have done over the years with those delightful creatures, chicken?
Leave Badgers out of it! An anti badger campaign has nothing whatsoever to do with
Badgers, everything to do with the “Batteryization” of the UK dairy herds.
They make big profits, whilst the S-ms are knocking the organic(ie in the fields) dairy farms for 6 with effective cartel purchase prices less than the cost of production,
and then you want to Cull/kill badgers because of it!!!
Whackey!
Carl’s arguments are as always valuable, and in this case a general background. I hope he and the Baroness will
accept the rather finer precision of the argument presented to them now.
And the lords are parastites, but we aren’t proposing killing them
Talking of money, I see one of failures of the Lords, to deal with expenses, has another candidate for an upcoming court appearance
At precisely what level on what scale, Baroness, does a wild creature become ‘vermin’? Whilst as for plantlife, one man’s wildflower is another man’s ‘weed’. Personally, I eschew such terms.
And, indeed, what species (of mammal at any rate) is incapable of carrying disease?
At the National Office of the Wildlife Trusts, we were aware of a probable connection of badgers and bovine TB back in the mid-90s and could only see the eventual development of a vaccine as a possible solution. It is a great shame that progress has been so slow.
“It is a great shame that progress has been so slow.”
That’s cold comfort for farmers whose herd has been destroyed. Or indeed for all those arable and small scale poultry owners who suffer the nuisance of attacks without any real recourse other than expensive counter measures.
Gareth`s information as usual, invalueable. I was totally unaware, as I believe the majority to be. I hit the first link in google after searching “battery cows” and was pretty shocked.
http://www.animalaid.org.uk/images/pdf/booklets/zerograze.pdf
Although this pdf maybe by bunny huggers, I don`t know, it affirms the existence of this practice and as Gareth rightly points out we know this practice to be cruel and not in the best interest of anyone from what we have learnt from chickens.
One may ask the question how long until “Soylent Green”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green
Hansard April 2010
Cattle: Disease Control
“The Government take bovine TB very seriously and are fully committed to tackling the disease. We have a package of measures in place to reduce further spread and incidence of bovine TB including regular testing, ¦1002zero tolerance of overdue tests, pre-movement and extended use of gamma interferon. In November 2009 the EU Commission formally agreed to the UK’s Eradication Plan and to provide funding of up to €10 million for 2010, which can be claimed to reimburse costs of TB testing and compensation for cattle slaughtered. The funding will be shared between DEFRA and the Welsh and Northern Irish administrations.
We are continuing to make significant investment in vaccines. £20 million will be spent over the next three years on vaccine development. A Badger Vaccine Deployment Project will take place in six high incidence areas each of 100km2 (25,000 acres) in England, with vaccination starting in this summer 2010.”
http://services.parliament.uk/hansard/Commons/ByDate/20100318/writtenanswers/part012.html
Thanks for this interesting article. Closer to home, who will be protecting Lord Taylor ?
http://www.lordtaylor.org/taylorstip
And how can one prevent a cull of Parliamentarians from both Houses ?
What packet of measurse does the government have to prevent a rare animal species from being wantonly exterminated for the sake of the huge profits that the supermarket cartel makes in the sale of milk.
If you will allow me to say on the subject of cows, all the CRAP, abour bovine/Badger crossover TB is exactly that, devious retailer crap.
Final Report of the
Independent Scientific Group on Cattle TB
http://www.defra.gov.uk/foodfarm/farmanimal/diseases/atoz/tb/isg/report/final_report.pdf
“General Conclusions
1. On the basis of our careful review of all currently available evidence, we conclude
that badger culling is unlikely to contribute positively, or cost effectively, to the control of
cattle TB in Britain (10.48 and 10.92).
2. We conclude that there is substantial scope for improvement of control of the
disease through the application of heightened control measures directly targeting cattle.
Therefore, we recommend that priority should be given to developing policies based on
more rigorous application of control measures to cattle, in the absence of badger culling.”
Remarkable that scientific evidence seems to be being ignored.
Australia had a problem with Bovine TB up until 2002 when it was stated that it was eradicated. This appears to have done through tighter controls on herds and movements, imports/exports. Even up until 2002 when it was prevelent in Australia, the country had no Badgers.
Australian scientific evidence seems to suggest lots of false positives with the gamma interferon tests, the way animals are farmed affecting spread including possible infection from bird feces and other anomalies.
http://ukpmc.ac.uk/articles/PMC515264%3bjsessionid=B20CDD9C9FFB3D3D6C1BC07FEE405221.jvm1
I am no expert at translating research papers but all the scientific evidence I have looked at seem to suggest that Badger culling will not eradicate Bovine TB, it may well have an opposite effect.
There is evidence that farmers themselves are lax in efforts to report, test for the disease and in other areas such as import/export control.
The incidence of cattle fields to Badger setts is so completely and utterly different from what it was even 20 years ago that killing them
to protect field cattle (not battery cattle) is quite irrelevant.
I stress once again that it can only be a thoroughly devious side issue to justifying
much grater battery rearing of milking cows, and hence much greater profits by milking the cows not just to the bone but to the skeleton, without so much as having regulations and law to protect the dignity
and ANIMAL RIGHTS of the batteryized Beasts.
What Regs and Acts are there for the control of Cows in Batteries, as there are for Hen/chickens, in terms of minimum Square metrage for them, air quality, all the things deemed to be necessary for the ‘Dignity’ of the animal?
Chickens have regained some, but if you buy
any old cheap eggs in the S-m you are buying
pain,suffering and degradation and Cruelty of the living beast.
If you buy ANY milk in the S-m it is very difficult to know thanks to confusing and confused pricing policy what you are buying since the prices are all so close together for something which is “white and wet” and called “milk”.
It is curious how something which will make half a pound of cheese for the fat that has been removed cost only 5p or so more (but sometimes less!) than a product produced organically and in the open field.
I urge the baroness to examine Milk prices and the tricks the retailers are up to deceive the purchaser, and her nobility with scientific talk of BADGERS!
I prefer my milk with the TB in it thank you very much!!!!!!!!!!!!! ORGANIC MILK (and there ain’t any).
Some Facts.
Gm Maize crops produce more than twice the yield of hay grass. That is why vast swathes of the countryside are now metres deep in maize and no longer cattle pasture.
Storage,drying, harvesting,planting of maize make it a very valuable crop for indoor feed.
The vector for Tb would be the faeces of
badger on the growing pasture of feeding cattle.
That all but no longer exists.
First it’s maize; which grows up, high, and long.
Second by way of local example in an area of Hardy country once known as the “Vale of the Great Dairies” where there may have been 40 or 50 dairy units there are on 20sq miles now at the most 6 dairy farms.
In the vicinity where I have cycled on bridleway and foot path of about 6 of those square miles, there are not more than three
badger setts.
ALL the rest of the dairies have closed down in the last 18 years due to BIG LOSSES; all the rest are gently losing money, except three or four which are in a local Dairy FarmHerd Dairy, and highly prized and cared for, as excellent milk for the local town.
Those few herds ALSO do well by effectively side stepping S-M RETAIL TRICKERY if not downright theft, both from the consumer and from the producer, very nearly bancrupting the dedicated dairy farmer in the last few years, who had had to move on to BEEF and Horses livery stables.
GIVE THE POOR BADGER A CHANCE! HE HAS NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH IT, whether in Battery byre or open organic field.
Go back to your Fancy dress Baronessa Noble!!
Lastly, I hope,the Badger kill publicity also seems to be targetted at the DAIRY FARM DAIRIES, ie those very enterprising dairy farmers who have succeeded in outwitting the
Super markets’ effective cartel of dairy milk, by retailing their own milk thoroughly well pasteurized, with excellent hygiene certificates as well as health and safety regs fully complied with.
These dairy farmers often in local consortium
make a better living than they ever did since before the 1960s.
Well done! BEATEN THOSE supermarket MONSTERS, a fact of which the thieving supermarkets are very jealous.
Answer: concoct a lobby campaign orchestrated above to decry, by whatever means, the marvellous open pasture and meadow of the dairy farm dairy production.
Look out for the DAIRY FARM DAIRY. It is honest, self employed, organic, local; GOOD!
First of all, Many apologies for this belated response, I have been abroad. I’ll try to respond to all of your interesting comments. Carl H. I do agree we need to preserve and cohabit with other species whenever possible. Badgers are however not an endangered species, There are far more of them than we used to have and even if we were to eliminate them from a wide area they would still thrive in other areas. Of course there is a balance to be struck but at present the badgers are disabling one of our important agricultural industries. Of course a vaccine would be best but it is some years away. I was quoting from the same report you do in your later responses, the evidence was from studies of ineffective partial culling.
JSDM, Balance is what I’m asking for, not destruction. And all of you who mention human killing in the same breath must ask them selves whether they kill ants nests, near the kitchen door, wasp nests near bedrooms and flies in the kitchen? Yes, well the principle of killing badgers isn’t any different then is it? Or is it a case of the bigger the animal, the more sympathy there is?
Gareth Howell, it simply isn’t true that there are no dairy herds left in the open air although cows are kept inside for the winter months…visit the West Country and see! I share your anxiety about the adverse effects of intensive dairy farming; I want both cows and badgers to live a good life.
Lord Blagger, not a badger point really.
Stephen Paterson, as you say the word vermin is very much like weed, it’s a value judgement in a given context. But I agree of course a cattle vaccine would be ideal, although it would also be better for the sake of the badgers’ health is we could stop them catching TB too.
Croft, I agree.
Bedd Gelert, This is all your fault! I’d be the first to cull the Lords, in gentlemanly fashion of course, watch this space…
Noble lady, that you are responding directly to submissors (by name) is exemplary in comparison with some other Nobles.
Nonetheless, there are far too many enthymemes and non-sequiturs for any clear formal-argument and conclusory moral-reasoning to reach out from this blog so far ((but that would a rarety amlngst the LOTB blogs anyway)).
Our civilisation is a very im-balancing ‘Regime’, ‘lording it’ over every other life-form, non-renewable resource, renewable resource and major-lifesupport on Earth. It is ourselves we need to be Balancing.
Let us glance back at how wealthy blindness coupled with super-political power and retarded mind-functioning on the part of the French aristocracy caused a revolutionary-reaction to explode from the People with consequent almost crazed culling of the Governing Class itself complete with plentiful ‘collateral damage’ and cartloads of severed heads being hauled away from the daily-busy guillotine.
The Establishsment, Aristocracy and Minions thereto had become not simply intolerably unsustaining but intolerably unsustainworthy.
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I fear that the Mr Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ once again puts the cart before the horse in preaching “more power to the People” long before the People have grown enough Ability and been sufficiently extensively Enabled to use that power to best advantage for all.
This badger problem is just one of the many microcosmic symptoms of Britain’s failure to keep both its Leadership and its following People up-to-the-mark.
Even old schools of self-responsibility such as psychology’s ‘projection’-awarenessing still rightly shines the spotlight here onto lack of human-respnse-ability and mind-capability, rather than onto the midnight badger grubbing for a mere 10% share of the worm-population in the soil co-created by the God our Nation-State worships.
A spotlight ignored.
The new-psychology of Perceptual Control could have greatly accelerated our practical maturation and self-sustain-worthying as a Win-Win-Win Human Race nurturing Earth’s Lifesupports and rationing our consumption of them ;
instead of as under Descriptive Sciences and Psychologies, which still centrally include Reinforcement Theory and Individual-Reward Economics, and continue imbalancedly over-consuming and irreversibly-destroying scarce non-renewable resources, and extincting many renewable lifesupports, such that they no longer need to appear on our Renewable Resources List, thus further fulfilling the great fear stated twenty years ago by Professor Jonathan Stone that “we humans have become a Plague on Earth”.
Other commenters have reaasoned very strongly against the foot-and-mouth-rapid-emergency “culling” you appear to be very strongly pushing for.
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Let us reason together.
Often our new ‘insight’ is best shown as light that we can reflect towards very many others from the ‘genius’ of a mere one or two others:
Dr Thomas Gordon gave us Friendly Method III Win-Win-Win Participatorily Cooperative Problem Solving and Needs, Hows, and Affordable-Costs recognition, that in itself should long have become doubly-entrenched as an absolute essential to any Democracy.
“Kinship With All Life” recounts how one individual human was able to ‘make contact’ with a nest-of-ants (not mildly outside like you project that we out here are all killing, along with killing wasp-nests and flies in our bedrooms.
A quick core-grasp of the new-psychology can be gained from
(1)Ed.Dag Forssell,”Perceptual Control Theory” ISBN 978-0-9740155-8-3 page 260 ‘In a nutshell’.
(2)Caroline Dweck “Self Theories” ISBN 1-84169-024-4 (Back Cover reviews).
“Mindset” ISBN 9978-0-345-47232-8 Closing lines: “…keep the growth-mindset in your thoughts…It will always be there for you, showing you a path into the future.”
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Neither has any group of the People nor any effective group of Parliamentarians built any cooperative ability to use the Six Thinking Modes for dealing with difficulties like the badgers.
Instead, our parliamentarians spend our valuable legislative time, that we have given them literally as a ‘blank-cheque’.
badgering each other instead of getting down to all-round thinking and win-win-win problem-solving.
My original comment therefore stands, but now would be much more in support of comments by others than in support of your apparently too hasty and somewhat non-sequitur resort to ‘the gun’, noble lady; which saddens me because you do evidently have an honest and concerned spirit.
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(JSDM0057Sn25July10)
My Lady, Jim Fitzpatrick stated as above “A Badger Vaccine Deployment Project will take place in six high incidence areas each of 100km2 (25,000 acres) in England, with vaccination starting in this summer 2010”
As quoted from Hansard. Are you saying Mr. Fitzpatrick is wrong in his information and there is no vaccine ?
Evidence suggests that bad stock controls by some farmers contributes to the spread of the disease in worse ways than badgers.
Although you quoted some of the report the conclusions were that culling would not eradicate the problem, it could possibly make it would make it worse and it is highly unlikely that a total extermination could be carried out.
“And all of you who mention human killing in the same breath must ask them selves whether they kill ants nests, near the kitchen door, wasp nests near bedrooms and flies in the kitchen? Yes, well the principle of killing badgers isn’t any different then is it? Or is it a case of the bigger the animal, the more sympathy there is?”
There is a vast difference between killing a few insects and wiping out a complete species of animal. No one as far as I read suggested exterminating ants, flies or wasps entirely. This seem`s a desperate defence.
HIV has killed far in excess than bovine TB, although I can find no data on TB deaths at present. The source of HIV is believed to be chimpazee`s / Bonobo monkeys would the noble Lady back a plan to exterminate those species too ?
The Badger population is put at 300,000 a complete cull, extermination is financially very heavy. Humans because of pasteurisation of milk cannot contract the TB. Therefore one must assume the problem is merely a financial one.
Farmers are not convinced and are angry at the gIFN (Gamma Interferon) tests because of the amount of false positives they think occur. This cannot be proved because few animals are tested at slaughter for the disease.
http://www.farmersguardian.com/gamma-interferon-blood-test-%E2%80%93-is-it-friend-or-foe?/16091.article
Farmers do receive compensation for cattle slaughtered due to testing positive for TB, these amounts are set by Government. Farmers maybe angry at the amounts.
So the risk to humans is negligible, we can rule that out as the problem. It appears the pressing problem is financial. The concept then is to eradicate a species for whose benefit ?
The science points out that better control of farm stock is as much help as badger culls and that cattle are just as likely to spread TB in badgers.
Farmers are just as annoyed at Defra as they are at Badgers.
The total extinction/slaughter of yet another British species for financial benefit in the short term until a vaccine is available is nonsensical.
Farmers are just as annoyed at Defra as they are at Badgers.
The compensation Farmers get for cases of suspected Bovine TB come from tax payers. I see no protest against badgers by tax payers as yet in Parliament Square.
The argument for a complete cull is ridiculous, science states it would not eradicate bovine TB. The disease is not a threat to humans. Testing for bovine TB is not 100% conclusive.
Carl H, the vaccine available is a badger vaccine, not a cattle vaccine. Trapping and vaccinating badgers is quite a problem but there is quite a bit about it on the DEFRA website. Thanks for this info, it’s an interesting but difficult approach.