Government releases badger cull targets months late, raising serious questions over transparency and credibility.

Up to 15,670 more badgers targeted in the 2025 cull areas.

Badger Trust has serious concerns over the Government’s long-delayed publication of the 2025 badger cull re-authorisations and minimum and maximum cull numbers, released nearly two months after the intensive culling period ended in 12 zones, and while supplementary culling continues in a further nine areas until January 2026.

The late publication of these figures fundamentally undermines transparency. 

The Government claims these numbers are central to ensuring culling is “controlled” and “science-led”, yet they were withheld from the public throughout the cull itself, despite repeated Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. A recent FOI response from Natural England confirms that, while cull operators were given the minimum and maximum numbers before operations began, the public was not. Natural England states it has no records explaining why the numbers were not finalised or made public at the start of the season.

In reality, the minimum and maximum numbers were already known to cull companies before operations began, even though they have since been revised. The fact that these figures were shared privately with cull operators but not made public raises serious questions about accountability and openness in the licensing process.

Even more concerning is the Government’s continued practice of allowing cull contractors to estimate local badger populations, despite having a direct financial and operational interest in killing as many badgers as licences allow. This is clearly a conflict of interest, and one that would be unacceptable in almost any other wildlife management or regulatory context.

Accurate badger population surveys require ecological expertise, experience, and robust methodologies, skills that cull operators do not possess. An official badger population survey has not been conducted since 2011.

The wide discrepancies between minimum and maximum cull figures published for many areas further expose the uncertainty at the heart of this policy. The large variation in numbers strongly indicates that Natural England and Defra lack reliable data on how many badgers remain in these zones, despite more than a decade of intensive killing. A policy that claims scientific legitimacy cannot credibly operate with such levels of uncertainty about its own targets.

The Government will already know how many badgers were killed in the 12 intensive cull zones, given that operations ended nearly two months ago. Yet those final figures have still not been released, once again denying the public timely information about the scale and impact of the cull.

Nigel Palmer, Badger Trust CEO, said, “This pattern of delayed disclosure, conflicting population estimates, and opaque decision-making seriously undermines the badger culling policy and trust in government. Transparency after the fact is not transparency at all; it is damage limitation.”

Badger Trust reiterates its call for:

• Full and timely publication of all final cull figures. 

• An immediate end to all cull licences, given the strong evidence and widespread sentiment that culling is ineffective.

• A move away from the focus on badgers to the main source of infection: cattle.

  
  

After more than a decade of badger culling, the Government continues to demonstrate profound failings in transparency, scientific rigour, and wildlife protection. 

More than 247,000 badgers had been killed before these 2025 licences began. How many more have lost their lives? 

It is time to stop the badger blame game. Rather than investing further time and resources in vaccinating badgers, the focus must now urgently shift to cattle-based measures, identifying hidden bTB in herds, improving testing, and rolling out an effective cattle vaccine.