What
have I done to deserve this?
Guardian - Monday 12
April 1999
by Anne Perkins
It
is a soft spring morning. The sun is slowly burning off the mist
from the river Severn, revealing sleek, shiny cows just out of the
milking parlour. Birds sing. It is like a scene from The Wind In
The Willows. Somewhere, not far away, Mole is doing his housework.
Any
minute now, he'll get fed up being underground and go for a
stroll. At lunchtime he'll meet Ratty and be introduced to the
joys of messing about in boats. And soon he'll meet Mr Badger.
Very soon. In the book, Badger is a solitary creature. Round here,
he'll be shacked up with a dozen friends and family. And quite
likely, he'll have tuberculosis.
This
is the scene not of some time-warped rural idyll, but of a
political nightmare of the kind that threatens ministerial careers
and Labour's new dominance in the shires. It is a lethal
combination of animal rights and human health, of political
penny-pinching and astonishing scientific ignorance.....
What
most frustrates the badger lobby is MAFF's determined focus on the
badger as the source of the disease, and its refusal to examine
carefully other possible causes, even though it is clear the link,
if it's there at all, is not straightforward: there are many
examples of farms surviving unscathed in the middle of TB
'hotspots'. 'I think there are a whole lot of causes. It's as if
there are 10 light bulbs, and all of them have to be lit up before
a cow catches TB,' says Elaine King. 'Badgers may be one of them,
but so might intensive farming practices, and lack of trace
elements and all sorts of other things. Yet over 80 per cent of
research effort is into the badgers' role.' ......
If
the trials do finally come to a conclusion, no one sees an
acceptable next step. Elaine King warns, 'What if the trials show
the badger link is only 10 per cent of the problem? They won't
even have begun to find out what other contributory factors there
are. What we really need to do is to understand the disease in
cattle, that's where it's a problem, not in badgers.' But a
majority assume that the trials will prove that without badgers
there will be little if any TB in cattle. Then what? The logic
(which MAFF ministers are anxious to deny) is that mass culling is
the only solution. Yet no one thinks that will be
acceptable.......
Michael Clark
book |
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This is a superb book about badgers by Michael
Clark. His immense knowledge of badgers really shines through. Click here to buy:
2017 edition
or
2010 edition
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