Badger cull 'vital to avoid needless slaughter of cattle,' says CLA

The Country Land and Business Association has given its backing to government policy on bovine TB ahead of today's Opposition Day Debate, saying a badger cull is 'vital to prevent the needless slaughter of cattle.'

The Association is calling for MPs to vote against the motion "This House Believes that the Badger Cull Should Not Go Ahead" and to support a package of measures to stop the spread of bTB in England.

CLA President Harry Cotterell said: "The spread of bovine TB resulted in 28,000 cattle being slaughtered last year.

"This terrible disease is devastating rural communities and if we don't act now bTB will cost taxpayers £1billion over the next decade.

"Scientific evidence shows that a cull is necessary, as part of a package of measures, to help bring this disease under control."

Cotterell said that the current measures in place, including movement restrictions of infected herds and regular testing, have been unable to reduce the spread of the disease.

He added: "Other countries, such as New Zealand and Ireland have successfully reduced bTB infection using wildlife controls so we know it works."

National Beef Association National Director Chris Mallon said: "38,000 cattle lost per year, £100 million in costs per year, a major loss of food production and the destruction of many family businesses is the present and growing cost of TB to the UK."

The NBA along with the NFU, BVA and other organisations support the policy of controlling the spread of TB by controlling the badger population. It is essential that the present culls go ahead and that Parliament does not prevent what is a necessity in the control of this notifiable highly infectious disease. If we do not act now it will soon be too late and TB will become endemic within our cattle and wildlife populations with heightened risk of transfer to companion animal.

“For the last 20 years cattle movement controls have failed on their own to halt the onward spread of TB throughout the country, and it has been shown in Ireland, New Zealand and many other countries that without an effective wildlife control policy TB cannot be controlled. The decision to control the badger population is key to the control of TB within the cattle and wildlife populations” continued Mr Mallon.

An effective vaccination for cattle is at least ten years away, the present vaccination system for wildlife is inefficient, far too costly and does nothing to deal with the problem of those badgers already infected with TB and spreading the disease.

All of the above should be taken into careful consideration by the Members of Parliament before voting in the Opposition Day Debate on the 5th of June.

“The present pilots will assess the humaneness of controlling the badger population in this way. These pilots have not been entered into without great thought and consideration of the available evidence, the decision to cull is not anti-badger but anti-TB” added Mr Mallon.

But the widespread badger cull will not solve the problem of tuberculosis in cattle, according to Professor Peter Atkins, from the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience.

It has been claimed that controlling badger numbers will reduce the spread of TB in cattle and trial culls are due to begin this weekend. But Professor Peter Atkins has investigated the spread of bovine Tuberculosis (bTB) and believes that rolling out this approach across the country would be simplistic.

Professor Atkins said: “Badgers almost certainly play a part in spreading the disease, but my conclusion is that their impact over the decades has been far less than suggested.

"Very carefully arranged culling may have a part to play alongside other measures in areas of particular prevalence such as southwest England and South Wales, but my research suggests that extending the policy elsewhere may neither be justified nor particularly effective. It certainly won’t be a panacea.

"Bovine TB has been around for several hundred years and appears to have become more prevalent here in the UK because of the intensive cattle breeding and farming from the 18th century onwards. It is an airborne infection generally, so if cattle were confined without much ventilation, the disease inevitably spreads. We think the peak of bTB probably was in the middle or late 19th century, with perhaps as much as 80 percent of cattle then infected in some counties."

"It is very probable that other animals did and do carry TB including badgers and deer, but cattle-to-cattle transfer is likely also to be an important factor.

"For example, only one out of nearly 400 badgers killed in road accidents in Cheshire over two decades tested for the disease turned out to be positive. This goes against received wisdom that some badger communities could have been infected for decades after the disease was cleared from cattle in 1960.

"If there was little bTB amongst wildlife in Cheshire and similar counties, then reinfection of cattle from this source is a lower risk than in, say, Gloucestershire. Extending the same type of cull beyond the southwest in future would therefore be a mistake."

"Furthermore, no one has yet proved definitively which direction the infection travels between species. The Randomised Badger Culling Trial, which ran from 1998-2006 indicated complex, interwoven patterns of infection and concluded that badger culling was unlikely to be effective for the future control of bTB."

The British Veterinary Association (BVA) is reiterating its support for the planned badger cull pilots as part of the overall bovine TB eradication strategy in England.

Although the shooting of badgers is not expected to start until later in the season the BVA is responding to activity amongst those who oppose the cull and appealing to them to allow the necessary scientific work to take place unhindered in the two pilot cull areas.

The BVA pointed to the evidence base behind the policy – data from the Randomised Badger Culling Trials (RBCTs) – which shows that bovine TB in cattle can be reduced by around 16% in areas where a targeted, humane badger cull has taken place. The pilot culls will use different culling methods to the RBCTs and are therefore being monitored by the Independent Expert Panel made up of experts in veterinary pathology, animal welfare physiology, wildlife ecology, badger behaviour, wildlife management, ecological theory, statistics, and marksmanship.

Commenting, Peter Jones, President of the BVA, said: "We have not taken the decision to support the pilot badger culls lightly; we have considered all of the scientific evidence, which supports the management of bovine TB in badgers in order to reduce the incidence of the disease in cattle.

"We accept that there is a gap in our knowledge, which is whether controlled shooting can deliver a badger cull humanely and safely, and to the same degree of effectiveness as cage trapping and shooting. That is what the pilots are designed to address and why is it important that they are allowed to go ahead unhindered.

"We understand that this is a highly emotional issue but we must be able to gather the evidence to enable future policy decisions to be based on science."

After World War II, bTB fell dramatically because of a policy of slaughtering all cattle that tested positive and most herds were free of the condition by 1960.

But Atkins believes bTB in badgers is a spillover disease from cattle rather than an endemic condition and probably does not persist over lengthy periods. He believes a cull could even exacerbate the problem.

He added: “When badgers are disturbed, they seem to perceive they are being attacked and move from their original area by a kilometre or more and join other badger groups, which spreads the disease.”

Atkins believes that, following the 2001 foot and mouth crisis, different parts of the country were restocked with cattle from the southwest, a traditional breeding area, and that this has been a factor in the spread of bTB to regions that had previously had low incidence of it.

A likely solution to the problem may lie in vaccination, but unfortunately inoculating cattle for TB is forbidden by EU rules as it would render testing for the disease as ineffective, because all vaccinated cattle would test positive for it. The search for an adequate TB vaccine for cattle continues, but badgers can be vaccinated now to help prevent the spread of TB, an alternative to culling.

Atkins concluded that the government should take a more comprehensive approach to controlling TB.

He said: "The assumption that badgers are always responsible for this disease in cattle has to be reviewed. If our analysis showing the lack of disease persistence in medium and low density badger populations is correct, the improvement of cattle controls including improved testing, tighter movement controls and, eventually, a useable vaccine should be enough to halt the spread. We should continue to investigate and cooperate with farmers over this problem."