The culling fields - government mired in row over
badgers
Guardian - Wednesday July 5, 2000
by Trevor Lawson
Government ministers are poised to
allow the slaughter of thousands more badgers, adding to a pile of
20,000 corpses already being collected in the infamous "Krebs
experiment".
Ministry of Agriculture operatives
are currently swarming all over Cornwall, Devon, Gloucestershire
and Wiltshire, eradicating badgers in the experiment to prove they
give bovine tuberculosis (bTB) to cattle. But the Secretary of
State for Agriculture, Nick Brown, has spent months mired in
farmyard manure and wellies, in an effort to show he listens to
farmers. Although the experiment is costing £34m, he now seems
poised to condemn badgers before the evidence is available,
desperate to end farmers' incessant whining.
The problem is that proof of badger
involvement will not be available until 2004 at the earliest. And
the man gathering the evidence - Prof John Bourne - says it could
go either way. "We don't know if culling badgers makes things
better," he admits. "It could make things a sight
worse." It's thought that if badgers are a source of bTB,
culling leaves lonely survivors, which take the disease further
afield.
But with bTB increasing in cattle
at a rate of knots, the National Farmers' Union must be seen to be
doing something. It's concocted a proposal for more badgers to be
killed wherever badgers can easily be blamed for bTB break-outs.
The plan has been opposed by
conservation and welfare organisations, and by Bourne, in the TB
Forum, which was set up to look at short-term solutions to the
disease, focusing on cattle management. But ministry civil
servants have edited the opposition out of the minutes and left
the badger proposals off the forum's website, so as not to alarm
the public.
Instead, a sub-group has discussed
the proposals in secret. Officials deny that Brown supports the
plan, but in June he said he would consider further culling if the
TB Forum asked him to. Sources at Westminster indicate that he is
happy to proceed, as is Baroness Hayman, his Lords counterpart.
A secret NFU memo, seen by the
Guardian, shows that next week at the TB Forum meeting, the NFU
plans to force a vote on the issue. The Forum has been set up with
a majority of pro-cull organisations, so a majority is inevitable
if a vote takes place. Culling could then get formal approval
while the fox hunting bill dominates Parliament, reducing
unwelcome media attention. The NFU is also planning an autumn
press campaign, designed to convince people that they can catch
bTB from badgers.
"There's still no evidence
that badgers even transmit bTB to cattle. They certainly don't to
people," said Dr Elaine King from the National Federation of
Badger Groups. "Ministers say they have no intention of
approving 'widespread badger culling', while behind the scenes
their officials appear to be engineering a fait accomplis to
deliver just that."
Ironically, the proposals have
thrown the NFBG and Bourne into an unlikely alliance. Bourne
proposed the TB Forum in the first place, to concentrate on cattle
issues, and it now threatens to backfire. "Badgers are not in
its remit," he insists.
Michael Clark
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