When the Government announced recently that it was going to phase out badger culling over the next five years, and replace it with a vaccination programme, some people within the world of wildlife science welcomed the decision.
ZSL, one of the UK’s leading wildlife research organisations, described itself as “delighted” with the news.
A study by one of its senior research fellows, Prof Rosie Woodroffe, has found that the percentage of badgers testing positive for bovine tuberculosis (bTB) – which they are suspected of spreading to cattle – dropped from 16% to 0% following vaccination.
Natural England, the Government’s wildlife advisor, also welcomed the “refresh”, saying the vaccination of badgers and other disease control measures should be accelerated to reduce the need for culls.
But what if badgers do not regularly pass TB to cattle? That’s the view of the independent ecologist Tom Langton, who has authored several papers on the impact of culling on rates of bTB in cattle. If that’s the case, vaccinating them is pointless.
“No one has ever shown that vaccinating badgers stops TB in cattle,” says Langton. “It’s just a theory.” The largest badger vaccination effort carried out in the UK was in Pembrokeshire, where some 5,300 badgers were immunised against bTB at a cost of £1.6m.
“They ended up dropping it partly because there was no clear indication that it was working,” Langton says.
The biggest farming union, the NFU, has consistently supported the previous Government’s culling strategy, which has been going on for more than a decade and killed at least an estimated 230,000 badgers. In its response, it pointed to studies that have demonstrated the effectiveness of culling in reducing bTB in cattle, with one published last year suggesting a 56 per cent reduction had been achieved over four years.
“It is absolutely vital that this new strategy draws on all methods to control this devastating disease, especially where peer reviewed science has demonstrated benefits,” says NFU president Tom Bradshaw.
But other peer-reviewed science has shown culling to have no benefit at all. For example, Langton and two veterinary colleagues published a paper two years ago in the journal Vet Record that showed no significant difference in decreasing rates of bTB between areas where badgers had been culled and areas where they hadn’t.
Farmers are making some headway in tackling bTB, but it can be entirely explained by more rigorous cattle-based measures, the paper argued.
The issue of how to deal with bTB in cattle – and whether badgers are in anyway responsible – has been splitting opinion for more than half a century. Even with the fresh start proposed by the new Labour Government, it doesn’t seem likely that the rift will be healed any time soon.
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