New group fights badger cull in west Wales
7 Feb 2010 - BBC News
A new group opposed to the badger cull planned for parts of west Wales to
tackle the spread of bovine TB has held its first public meeting. John Evans of
Save the Badger, which met in Llantrisant, said it presented a united front
against a "cruel" cull to slaughter thousands of animals.
Mr Evans said the public were not aware of the scale of the cull and that
badgers would be killed "in their thousands". He said the
Save the Badger group
had been created now because "so many organisations have already been doing
things in isolation to each other. "We need to unite to show the people of Wales
there is so much opposition to this from so many organisations with all kinds of
interests. But on this one issue we all unite - we want to stop the cull of
badgers in Wales." Mr Evans also said the group planned "to demonstrate and
protest and hopefully get people to change their minds". He said: "We're not
advocating breaking the law. We will stay within the law. We believe we have the
public behind us."
The assembly government gave the final go-ahead for the cull, with more
frequent testing of cattle, in January. The cull area covers 288 sq km (111 sq mile) of north Pembrokeshire, and a
small part of Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire.
Rural Affairs Minister Elin Jones (elin.jones@wales.gov.uk) said in January: "Bovine TB is out of
control and unsustainable and last year cost the taxpayer nearly £24m in
compensating farmers. We know that cattle and badgers are the main sources of
the disease and that, if we want to achieve our aim of eradicating bovine TB, we
have to tackle the disease in both species. The approach we will be taking in
the pilot area, carrying out a badger cull alongside strict cattle controls, has
not been tried before in the UK. However, it is proving successful in countries
like New Zealand, where wild possums and cattle are the main sources of
infection."
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