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Badger Trust responds to Farmers Weekly article on Cull Parliamentary Debate

Charity clarifies cull facts and queries ‘misrepresentation’ of a scientific paper and ‘misleading and inaccurate’ MP quotes.


On 22nd March 2022, Farmers Weekly featured an article about the Parliamentary Debate on the badger cull. Badger Trust felt the article repeated comments by some MPs that simply don’t stand up to scrutiny and issued a response.


Peter Hambly, Executive Director of Badger Trust commented:


“We will continue to act as a voice for badgers in the face of the wildlife disaster that is the badger cull. Solutions to bovine TB should be based on science, cost and animal welfare grounds. The badger cull fails on all of these.
The evidence-base points to a cattle based solution to bTB. We will continue to call out people who focus on the badger cull as a smokescreen from enforcing robust cattle measures.”

The Letter to Farmers Weekly


Dear Farmers Weekly,


With regard to your article of 22 March on the badger cull, Badger Trust would like to respond with particular regard to some of the quotes you featured.


Thank you, firstly, for drawing attention to the scientific study regarding the impact of badger culling on bTB in cattle in high-risk areas, published in the journal Veterinary Record. It is always great to get more people interested in a research paper and the science, or lack of science, behind the badger cull.


Badger Trust wanted to clarify a few points for you as, based on available data, we feel you misrepresented the scientific paper and that selective referencing from the parliamentary debate on badger culling – in the form of Bill Wiggin MP’s quotes – are misleading, and inaccurate.


Speaking of “counterproductive, irresponsible and impossible to justify”, it sounds like perhaps Mr Wiggin was talking about the badger cull. As this recent paper and others[1],[2],[3] clearly show, there is no evidence that the badger cull is working. Badger Trust has been calling on DEFRA to show us this much-touted evidence base for years, but they have yet to produce it. The data for this latest study were all sourced from DEFRA’s own public records, yet DEFRA failed to notice, or at least report on, the lack of evidence for the ineffectiveness of the badger cull on any decline in bTB in cattle.


In fact, the much-quoted Downs et al. (2019) paper, rolled out by DEFRA in attempts to justify the cull, has been shown that rather than a decline in bTB in the three pilot cull areas cherry-picked from 2013 to 2017, the following year saw a 130% increase in bTB in cattle in Gloucestershire, one of the pilot areas in the study[4].


This latest analysis of eleven years of data, from both within and outside cull zones, shows no correlation between badger culling and a decline in bTB in cattle. Further analysis of ten county areas considered high-risk areas for bTB shows that in 9 out of 10 of these counties, bTB in cattle peaked and then began to fall before the government ever implemented a badger cull.


Nationally speaking, the number of cattle slaughtered early each year as a result of bTB over the past 10 years has remained fairly consistent between 26,000 and 33,000 cattle – a fact pointed out by Daniel Zeichner MP during the debate[5], but not reported on in your article. This also occurs at a time when, as your readers will know, cattle numbers in this country are declining.


You also failed to mention that the number of new herd incidences in England has increased in almost all areas since the cull began, whereas in Wales the number of new herd incidences has reduced in the same time, without any mass culling of badgers[6]. It should be noted that Scotland has been considered Officially Tuberculosis Free status since 2009 under the EU Council Directive 64/432/EEC without a badger cull.


Chris Loder MP’s quote from the debate that “Animal and Plant Health Agency shows that 64% of new TB cases in cattle in high-risk areas, such as the South West, are transmitted from badgers” simply has no evidence-base. APHA has never released the source of this figure to the public in any robust scientific analyses of their own data[7].


Your comment regarding an effective cattle vaccine is also misleading. The main issue is not with the vaccine as such, but with an accurate test that can detect the difference between a vaccinated animal and an infected animal[8]. Perhaps Robert Goodwill MP should be putting pressure on DEFRA, if he wants to have an effective policy, to field trial multiple testing options, including the potentially more accurate Actiphagae test that can detect this difference, and within 6 hours[9],[10], alongside their conventional skin test. Instead DEFRA continues to waste millions of pounds of the taxpayers money, with little regard to the farmers and their cows that are being culled early, by field trialling a test that is likely to be no more accurate than the current SICCT test of around 50%.


Farmers need to be seeking reassurance from DEFRA that any field trials being conducted regarding cattle vaccination and testing are the most robust, comprehensive, and best use of money that they can be, and not be appeased by DEFRA that one is coming after yet another failed attempt to deliver an effective cattle vaccine and testing regime.


Badgers need to stop being used as a smokescreen for DEFRA’s lack of accountability for the lack of effective management of an epidemic that has gone on for too long, for the sake of farmers and their livestock and for British wildlife. The lack of independent overview or scientific controls in place by DEFRA need to be answered to justify the mismanagement of public funds, and the unnecessary loss of animals' lives.


Thank you.


Yours,


Peter Hambly

Executive Director, Badger Trust



References

1 Charles H, Godfray J, Donnelly CA, Kao RR, Macdonald DW, McDonald RA, Petrokofsky G, Wood JLN, Woodroffe R, Young DB, McLean AR. (2013) A restatement of the natural science evidence base relevant to the control of bovine tuberculosis in Great Britain. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.1634. Accessed 21st March 2022.


2 Crispell et al., (2019) Combining genomics and epidemiology to analyse bi-directional transmission of Mycobacterium bovis in a multi-host system. eLife 2019;8:e45833 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.45833. Accessed 21st March 2022.


3 Volkova, V.V., Howey, R., Savill, N.J., Woolhouse, M.E. (2010) Potential for transmission of infections in networks of cattle farms. Epidemics, (September 2010) 2(3): 116-122. DOI: 10.1016/j.epidem.2010.05.004. Accessed 21st March 2022.


4 McGill, I and Jones M (2019) Cattle infectivity is driving the bTB epidemic. Vet Record 185(22), 699-700. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31806839/ Accessed 23rd March 2022.


5 Badger Culling (Mr Philip Hollobone - in the Chair - in Westminster Hall at 4:30pm on 21st March 2022. https://www.theyworkforyou.com/whall/?id=2022-03-21a.1.0&p=11804. Accessed 23rd March 2022.


6 Uberoi, E. (2019) Bovine TB Statistics: Great Britain. Briefing Paper. House of Commons Library. Number 6081, 22 July 2019.


7 Wright, E. & Mayer, S. (2020) Critical Evaluation of the Animal and Plant Health Agency report: ‘Year End Descriptive Epidemiology Report: Bovine TB Epidemic in the England Edge Area - Derbyshire 2018’. Derbyshire Wildlife Trust.


8 APHA (2021) Field trials for leading cattle vaccine and skin test for bTB. Published 7 July 2021


9 Srinivasan, S. et al., (2020) A Defined Antigen Skin Test That Enables Implementation of BCG Vaccination for Control of Bovine Tuberculosis: Proof of Concept. Front. Vet. Sci., 24 DOI.org/10.3389/fvets.2020.00391


10 Langton, T. (2020) Is DIVA bovine TB test a breakthrough? The Ecologist.


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