www.badgerland.co.uk
Fact-based scientifically-accurate educational information about Badgers
Home Shop Animals Pictures Help Seeing Groups Education News Search Books
Teaching Age 3-7 Age 8-11 Age 12-16 Age 17+ Poems Stories Politics Research Journals
 

Sterilizing badgers to control bovine TB

Badgerland online shop

Badger by Tim Roper Collins New Naturalist Library (114) - Badger
This reference work is packed with detail about the badger - great for studious readers - there is no better book in print.  Click here to buy:
Paperback edition or Hardback edition
Kindle edition

 

Journal

Biodiversity and Conservation, Volume 7,Number 6, June 1998, pp. 705-723(19) - Kluwer Academic Publishers

Authors

Tuyttens F.A.M.; Macdonald D.W. from the WildCRU, Department of Zoology, Oxford

Abstract

Sterilization has rarely been considered as an alternative to culling or vaccination to control wildlife diseases. Disease control by sterilization, as by culling, has most promise when the host's ability for compensatory growth following the removal of density-dependent inhibitions is limited, and when moderate reductions in population density cause disproportionately large reductions in disease prevalence, or even eliminate the disease. For many host/disease examples this will not be the case and vaccination may have overwhelming advantages or may be the only practical option. The impact of sterilization on host density and disease prevalence will develop relatively slowly because sterilization can prevent the recruitment of only one age-cohort at a time. Moreover, unless there is vertical transmission, this age-cohort will consist only of susceptibles. Culling, on the contrary, removes infected as well as susceptible animals. However, for certain disease/host examples, the relative effectiveness of the different control strategies may be altered considerably if their variable effects on the probability of disease transmission are taken into account. Social perturbation or stress could render certain culling strategies ineffective or even counter-productive. Depending on how disease dynamics are influenced by the host's age-structure and reproductive investment, fertility control could offer epidemiological advantages that have been ignored by most disease/host models. We illustrate some of these principles by investigating the theoretical and practical feasibility of an hypothetical sterilization campaign to control bovine tuberculosis in badgers (and hence cattle) in Britain.

Keywords

Meles meles; Mycobacterium bovis; fertility control; wildlife disease; population control

Web site