No proof that culling badgers reduces bovine TB in cattle by over 50%

Badger Trust shares its response to Farmers Guardian piece 08/03/24 to correct ongoing government misinformation.

Dear Editor,

Your front cover feature on 08/03/24 suggests that there is proof that culling badgers reduces bovineTB in cattle by over 50%. There isn’t.

This is part of the ongoing misinformation being put out by Defra and others that seek to make badgers the primary spreaders of bovineTB. They aren’t.

This scapegoating is causing immense damage to badgers – around half of the population has been culled because of it. It also damages farmers as it wastes time and resources that should be spent improving biosecurity, especially around cattle movements, and most importantly, improving the testing regime and introducing cattle vaccination.

The Birch report that the article refers to has already been heavily critiqued by the likes of leading biologist Oxford University’s Professor David Macdonald. The report itself says it cannot “explicitly distinguish the effect of badger culling” from the other measures in the cull zones. Unlike cattle, badgers in the cull zones are not even tested for bovineTB before being slaughtered.  

The 56% figure itself refers to a change in herd incidence rate per herd year from 0.145 to 0.065, but that doesn’t translate into an equivalent change in the number of cattle testing positive for bovineTB – a measure most farmers and taxpayers recognise.  The number of cattle and the proportion of cattle prematurely slaughtered for bovineTB has barely shifted at all since before the cull started, despite the millions spent by taxpayers and by individual farmers. 

BovineTB is overwhelmingly a cattle-to-cattle spread disease.  Accepting that fact and the science behind it would help move the debate on and lead to more effective policy-making by Defra. Let’s have policy that follows the evidence, not an increasingly desperate search for evidence that might fit the policy.

Peter Hambly

Executive Director

Badger Trust