Just a thought but surely Bovine TB will always be a problem in bovine (aka cows) all the time we have intensive farming and no vaccine, sure badgers may contribute but having a couple of hundred cows in a shed is going to cause far more spread of the disease than any badger wondering around. Or am i missing a massive point?
All this pontificating fails to address something that was noticed by anyone who spends time in the country.. Badger numbers are down, regardless of the cull, and were significantly lower than the pre-full research estimations.. Not quite the ‘spiralling out of control numbers’ line that was being bandied about by the press and the pro-full lobby.
So what gives?
In a phone call to Phil Spencer at Natural England, he acknowledged the following
1. He didn’t understand how the rules of a trial could be changed after the event – this was for Defra to explain
2. He accepted that the cost per killed Badger was approx £3000 including Police costs, but did not know who would pay for the additional policing costs if the cull was extended.
3. He understood that the Pilot Cull was to test free shooting, but confirmed that a very high proportion of Badgers killed towards the end of the cull had been cage trapped and shot. He couldn’t explain how a trial of one particular method of culling could actually use a completely different method and produce meaningful results.
Moss, and his company ARP Farms Ltd, admitted failing to provide evidence for the movement of cattle between 1999 and 2009 when appearing before Lowestoft magistrates in 2011.
He had failed to register Red Poll cattle under strict regulations brought in following the outbreak of BSE in the 1990s.
During an inspection in May 2009, officers came across 93 unregistered cattle on Botany Farm. They also found that 94 “registered” cattle could not be traced and were no longer on the land.
if we assume that the purpose is to exterminate all badgers, when TB is still there, what next? Wild Boar, they are known carriers and the FoD population borders on to the cull area. Or how about the deer, plenty of them around as well.
I know shall we just kill every ****ing wild animal?
Then once we have done that maybe we can actually consider Farm bio-security!
I know shall we just kill every ****ing wild animal?
No, just badgers, foxes, stoats, polecats, common shrews, yellow-necked mice, wood mice, field voles, grey squirrels, roe deer, red deer, fallow deer, and muntjacs, should do it.
All this pontificating fails to address something that was noticed by anyone who spends time in the country.. Badger numbers are down, regardless of the cull, and were significantly lower than the pre-full research estimations.. Not quite the ‘spiralling out of control numbers’ line that was being bandied about by the press and the pro-full lobby.
No… And they never will, because the baselines they’re using are complete mince, so it’ll be impossible to correctly apportion any changes. Even if there is a decline in bovine tb, the study can’t be anything but a failure.