With the announcement that costly and ineffective badger culls are to continue in Gloucestershire and Somerset, Greens call once again for measures that will actually help farmers.
Chris Jockel, Green Party candidate for Stroud, commenting on the restarting of what he called “the discredited, unsafe and inhumane badger cull” [1] said:
“There is no easy answer to bTB; it’s complex. Approximately 6% of badgers, are infected but the cull plans a wholesale slaughter of 75% of them. We should be implementing a policy that meets the needs of the dairy industry and our iconic wildlife, one that might actually work. Farmers need our support in the face of all powerful supermarkets ramping down the price of milk, resulting in less money to spend on husbandry and bio-security. We need a rational strategy that works – culling is not it.”
Farming is an essential part of the south west regional economy. Culling has proved to be incredibly expensive [2] whilst failing to deliver solutions for farmers. [3]
Penny Burgess, Green candidate for Cotswold said:
“It is with sorrow and anger that I watch the Badger cull begin once again in Gloucestershire and Somerset. Why are the government so keen to promote this pointless, cruel and unpopular policy that has been proven over and over again to have no basis in science and to have caused much suffering to an iconic wild animal? There are much better ways to control Bovine TB, which are being tried with success in other areas, such as the badger vaccination program in Wales. I am delighted to hear that The Badger Trust has won permission to appeal the ruling over the legality of the latest culls, though. Hopefully sanity will prevail.”
Notes
[1] Badger culls were ‘ineffective and failed humaneness test’. An independent scientific assessment of last year’s pilot badger culls in parts of Gloucestershire and Somerset has concluded that they were not effective.
[2] £7.29m estimated cost of badger cull, according to animal welfare charity ((£4,116 per badger killed)
Source: Independent Expert Panel, Care for the Wild
[3] Analysis commissioned by the government found the number of badgers killed fell well short of the target deemed necessary, and up to 18% of culled badgers took longer than five minutes to die, failing the test for humaneness. Extensive research carried out by Prof Woodroffe in earlier trials in the 1990s had shown that a failure to kill this percentage of badgers in a narrow window of time could actually worsen matters as disturbed and diseased animals took the TB into new areas.