Badger Vaccination Q&A with Badger Trust Chief Executive, Peter Hambly

Answering your questions about badger and cattle vaccination for bovine TB.

We’ve had many questions about vaccination (of badgers and cattle) since we published our article explaining the downside of a national badger vaccination programme. So we’ve put the questions to our Chief Executive Peter Hambly.

1. Why don’t you support cattle vaccination rather than badger vaccination?

We do! Cattle to cattle is the main way bTB spreads, so the solution to infection also lies in the cattle herd. A cattle vaccination programme, linked to a vastly improved testing regime in England, is the best way to deal with this disease. 

Badgers are not the problem, and of course, farmed cattle are already routinely vaccinated for other diseases, so they are much easier to vaccinate than wild badgers! DEFRA needs to introduce cattle vaccination as soon as possible and make it easier for vets and farmers to vaccinate cattle.

2. Why don’t you just support badger vaccination rather than badger culling?

We would always prefer badger vaccination to badger culling if it saved badger lives, which is why we have supported local vaccination projects with grant funding. 

However, the logistics of a national badger vaccination scheme at scale would be expensive and hard to deliver. It also continues to falsely imply badgers are a significant spreader of bTB.

Even if a widespread, national badger vaccination programme were successful at vaccinating every badger, the infection of bTB in cattle would persist, as this strategy fails to account for the primary causes of infection in cows. We fear that in this case, badgers would then once again unfairly come into the firing line for bTB spread, and culling would return. It is a well-meant but misguided plan by the new government that won't make any material difference to bTB in cattle and won't stop those determined organisations and individuals from wrongly blaming badgers. 

It is not the badgers that are the main spreaders of bTB, it’s the cows. Sadly, when we surveyed farmers last year, 87.3% of the small number who responded said that badgers should be culled regardless of bTB.

3. Would you ever support badger vaccination?

We have supported badger vaccination when we think it helps badgers from getting bTB from cows, stops badgers being culled, and where we point out it’s not the badgers spreading bTB but the cows. 

We fund local badger groups to carry out vaccinations in these cases, and committed volunteers have done great work to protect badgers. 

There is a more successful approach to bTB in Wales, where no badgers are culled, and the focus is on cattle measures. There is some badger vaccination to protect badgers from bTB in areas of particularly high bTB among cattle and where all measures are being used. This is exceptional, and we can support it in these cases.

4. Is badger vaccination more expensive than culling?

It is impossible to say the exact cost of vaccinating a badger, as this depends on the scale of vaccination being delivered. Often, farmers are expected to pay a lot of the costs of both vaccination and culling. 

At present, the majority of culling is done by free shooting, which involves targeting animals in open areas where food has been strategically placed to keep them within sight. This is unethical and distressing, as badgers can get injured and die over many days. 

Originally, all badgers were meant to be cage-trapped before shooting, however, this approach was deemed too costly and continues to be viewed as prohibitively expensive by many farmers. Vaccination would involve cage trapping, releasing, disinfection and resetting of traps — so would likely be more expensive, but would also represent a significant improvement to the welfare of badgers.

5. Why are badgers blamed for all this?

Farmers and the public have been misled. DEFRA and, sadly, some farming industry leaders spread the story that badgers are to blame when bTB is mainly spread from cattle to cattle (94% of cases [1]). The most recent government-funded study on the issue found cattle were 800 times more likely to give bTB to badgers, than badgers to cattle [2].

Farmers need to be told the facts and given the right advice. We must support farmers by introducing cattle-based measures such as intelligent movement controls, accurate testing, and finally, cattle vaccination. 

The scapegoating of badgers is a scandal and has distracted England from following the lead of Scotland and Wales and properly dealing with this. Farmers need the truth, not the smokescreen they have received from DEFRA and some in their own industry for so long.

6. Do you support present badger vaccination projects?

If any project is protecting badgers at a local scale from culling and stops them from catching bTB from cattle then we can and do support it. Local volunteers do an amazing job protecting badgers and their dedication to offering vaccination to help protect their local badgers is acknowledged. However, using vaccination alongside badger culling is crushing for volunteers and badgers alike. 

We are questioning the idea of rolling out vaccination on a national scale, which still implies badgers are a major cause of bTB spread, and this is simply not true. The effort, time and finances used would be colossal and unsustainable and would be better spent helping develop and deploy more effective testing regimes and helping farmers improve cattle biosecurity and biocontainment. 

Badger vaccination is a costly distraction from the real issues and firmly keeps the focus on badgers being the root cause of the problem, which they are not.

Please send any more questions to hello@badgertrust.org.uk, and we will try to answer them.

References

1. Donnelly, C.A. and Nouvellet, P., 2013. The contribution of badgers to confirmed tuberculosis in cattle in high-incidence areas in England. PLOS Currents, 5.
   

2. Akhmetova, A., Guerrero, J., McAdam, P., Salvador, L., Crispell, J., Lavery, J., Presho, E., Kao, R., Biek, R., Menzies, F., Trimble, N., Harwood, R., Pepler, P., Oravcova, K., Graham, J., Skuce, R., du Plessis, L., Thompson, S., Wright, L., Byrne, A. and Allen, A. 2023. Genomic epidemiology of Mycobacterium bovis infection in sympatric badger and cattle populations in Northern Ireland. Microbial Genomics, 9(5): mgen001023.