The Badger Cull

I blame 'The Wind in the Willows'.

Of course money comes into it. Farmers are running a business. Rose veal is being promoted as one way of preventing unwanted male calves from being killed but there is still not enough demand for it to prevent male calves from being sent to the knacker's yard.

Badgers are not endangered. Their numbers have been increasing steadily. Forgetting TB for a moment, badger setts can cause damage and dangerous conditions in fields. Tractors and other large farm machinery have been known to overturn or sink into large holes. This, of course, is no reason for a cull but it's unfair to blame farmers for everything that doesn't fit with some people's ideal of the countryside.

I did think that whitewave but didn't want to over-egg my argument. I wonder how farmers can be heartbroken about some calves but not others. I suspect money comes into it.

It is also heartbreaking to see young newborn calves being killed because they are surplus to requirments or transported live abroad to met the same ends.

Amber there is an outcry because the case for the cull is far from proven. As absent says above - there has been a previous thread which contained a lot of very informed debate and well researched opinion on the subject. I am sorry that your rabbits were killed by a badger but I'm afraid I have the same attitude to that as I would have to the killing of livestock by a fox - if we choose to keep animals as either pets or livestock then we make them a target for predators and it is our responsibility to keep them safe. The badger or fox is only doing what it has to do ie. kill to eat. As for them attacking humans I don't think they would do so unless we got in the way of their food or threatened them in some way.

At the risk of being controversial, why is there such an outcry about this cull? Badgers are NOT rare, there are lots more of them around than there are foxes, but it is not news that foxes are frequently being shot. Badgers are NOT cute and cuddly creatures in fact they are quite vicious, and they do just as much damage in a hen run as a fox, in country areas (where most of them live) they often raid gardens and take hens and pet rabbits. In the village where I live there are several setts so they are loads of them.
Recently in the garden of a friend of mine, they attacked her 6 month old lab puppy he was badly mauled and needed a lot of veternary care to pull through, this was in the early evening luckily her two small boys were inside eating their evening meal, I hate to think what would have happened if they had still been in the garden at the time, but they did see the incident through the window, this is not an isolated incident it happens all the time. My daughter in law (who actully lives on the outskirts of a city) was attacked in her own garden when preganant with her second child, she heard one of her older son's pet rabbit screaming about 10pm one night and rushed out into the garden (thinking it was a fox) she found a badger had broken into the rabbit hutch and had killed one rabbit and was trying to kill the second one, the badger had hold of its back leg and was swinging it from side to side against its own body, she grabbed a garden broom and tried to chase the badger off, it dropped the rabbit and went after her! luckily a nieghbour heard the commotion and came to her aid, my son was away in Afganistan at the time (in the RAF), the rabbit was still alive so she called out the vet, who tried to save it but to no avail, they had not long moved to this area, her nieghbours told her they had a lot trouble with Badgers as there was a sett on the common nearby. In this village two of the locals farms have recently had out breaks of TB and between them have lost 307 animals a lot of them young calves the new stock of their herds these are animals they have bred them selves from herds they have cared for for a lifetime, these are not the huge comercial farms, just small family business's the farmers see these animals as part of their family and watch them grow with pride, it is heart breaking to have to watch young calves being destroyed because of this infection, which almost always coincides with badgers moving on to their property. Whether you like it or not, badgers do carry bovine TB they also CONTRACT and SUFFER from this disease, I am sure that the places that have been chosen for this cull will be in areas where there is a serious issue with this disease.

that should have said badger not badget!!

Like others I think the answer to bovine TB is vaccination. Not all farmers are in favour of the cull - one local farmer I know tells me he knows the whereabouts of a badget sett but is keeping it to himself, not only because of the cull but also the scum who are into badger baiting.

Well, perhaps the "unless the whatever" bit needs to be scrutinised again!

Why would farmers want to shunt their animals all over the place? They are running a business so the main reasons for movement are slaughter, re-stocking and change of ownership.

It is a statutory requirement that all cattle 42 days old and over moving from a 1 or 2 yearly tested herd must have tested negative to a TB test within 60 days prior to movement unless the herd or movement meets an exemption.

merlot They shunt around all over the place and how frequent is the regular testing? p.s. I was talking about foot and mouth as well as TB.

However, I must admit my ignorance of dairy farming in this country although, strangely, I have a bit of a grasp about how it works in New Zealand because absentdaughter's first husband was a dairy farmer. Isn't life weird?

absentgrana All cattle have to have passports and all movement must be recorded. Cattle undergo regular testing for TB and no animal is allowed to be moved off any farm unless given a clean bill of health.

This governement stopped funding for 5 out of 6 trials for vaccination. I trust there are activists hoping to prevent the shooting?

I anticipate some trouble when the shooting starts. I understand the need to eradicate disease, but surely vaccinations for herds could have been developed during the years this issue has been concerning farmers?

Interesting that you should mention foot and mouth goldengirl. Dairy farmers are compensated for the loss of cattle through foot and mouth and bovine TB. I realise that this may not cover all issues, such as replacing a herd that has been carefully built-up over time. However, if compensation weren't paid, perhaps farmers might modify some of their practices, such as transporting cattle all over the place to markets. They might pressurise pharmacology companies to develop more effective vaccines for cows. I appreciate that dairy farmers are having a particularly difficult time, but that is down to the greed of supermarkets and middlemen and nothing to do with TB.

I still don't understand why badgers get all the blame for something called bovine TB.

It makes me feel sick. I presume gives some people the feeling of power that perhaps they don't have in their miserable little lives. I thought that this cull was now on hold. It won't cure the problem just like killing cattle didn't during the foot and mouth epidemic.

What a world we live in

I can't help feeling that men with high-powered rifles shooting at frightened moving animals at night is a recipe for disaster. I also don't think this is going to achieve a reduction in bovine TB, but others (Juragran?) have already made far more informed comments about this than I can.