BADGER CULL

Enjoy the message to the UK government:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0j5kMxvLqw

See badger (and other animals) hero Brian May (in his Queen days) via these links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwnQGnqzKJo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0kTblnz–Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KQW4thcMDY&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgCKs9qxO1Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=2Drd032G0Wg&feature=endscreen

http://www.brianmay.com/

and Owen Paterson MP – government DEFRA Minister – The badgers have moved the goalposts !!

His excuses for the failures.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZ0oz86bvhA 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdJW6enfuzI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EllYgcWmcAY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfmrHTdXgK4

 On Mon 7^th Oct, after 6 weeks of night-time shooting, the marksmen’s guns fell silent and the Somerset badger cull officially ended.  

BUT the government (David Cameron and his stable mate Owen Paterson) has said they’ll extend the cull by 3 weeks in order to try and achieve the target figure.

An online petition, begun by Brian May, which called for an end to a cull of badgers has become the most signed e-petition on the Government’s website. More than 258,700 people added their name to the e-petition since it was started in Aug 2012.  It closed on 7^th Sept.

 Back in 2008 The Badger Trust welcomed the decision of Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg not to back a cull of badgers in a futile attempt to control bovine TB in cattle.   Mr Clegg said of the recent badger culling trials: The bias and evidence of that 10 year review was badger culls simply move the problem to other areas.  It only appeared to work in the cases they looked at where you had full badger cull hemmed in by coast or river boundaries. “Secondly Defra just doesn’t have the money to do it.  We can’t move forward in the absence of clearer evidence and in the absence of better resources for Defra.” 

Officers policing the badger culls in England have been accused of “highly questionable” actions by civil liberties lawyers after they told protesters their personal details would be passed to the National Farmers’ Union and handed out NFU-produced leaflets about the union’s civil injunction.  The NFU, which represents the private companies carrying out the cull, obtained a civil injunction prohibiting harassment of people linked to the cull, as well as the blowing of whistles and waving of torches to disrupt shooting. Gwendolen Morgan, a solicitor at Bindmans, said: “The police‘s actions here appear highly questionable. The passing of personal information to a private body, without any apparent legal basis, is a serious concern. Since when did the police become the enforcers of the NFU’s civil injunction?”   The NFU’s relationship with the government is also causing controversy, after Defra refused to disclose information on the cull on the grounds that communications with the NFU constituted “internal communications”. 

Humane?  Fresh doubt has been cast on the humaneness of the pilot badger cull after a Somerset councillor claimed a “steady trickle of botched kills” has been found outside the zone. Mike Rigby, an independent county councillor representing Bishops Lydeard on the edge of the cull area, fears injured badgers are not being killed instantly, as the Government claims, but are escaping and dying elsewhere.

High policing costs already mean that the cull is more expensive than a badger vaccination programme, according to one expert analysis. Then there is the possible cost to civil liberties being incurred by the cull. Finally, the pilot culls are failing even on their own terms, as far too few badgers are being shot. All this leads to an obvious question: when the costs outweigh the benefits, isn’t it time to stop? Damian Carrington, The Guardian Oct 1^st

Cull stupid – The ongoing cull of badgers, intended to curb tuberculosis in cattle, is stupid; it has already been shown to be ineffective as a policy; and the Government is surely only doing it to shut farmers up, rather than out of any conviction that it will do any good. Lord (John) Krebs, the president of the British Science Association and the former chairman of the British Food Standards Agency, ran a well-designed 10-year trial into badger culling. “The science is as clear-cut as it can be,” he told Radio 4’s The Life Scientific earlier this year, “and it shows that culling badgers is not a very effective way of reducing TB in cattle.” 

From article by Tom Chivers, Science comment The Telegraph 4^th Sept

Assault arrest – Gloucestershire police have arrested a man after a late-night incident in which a badger cull protester is alleged to have been assaulted and her car dented and wing mirrors ripped off.  Meg Jones, a badger cull protester, was with 2 other activists who were monitoring a badger sett when they heard shooting in the area.

The group split up to look for the marksmen, with the aim of disrupting the shooting.  Ms Jones said she was following a public footpath when a car with 4 men in it pulled up beside her. “2 got out the car and were shouting and screaming at me,” she said.  She alleges that the men tried to stop her calling the police. “One of the men was shaking my shoulders and hitting my arm, trying to prevent me from making a call to the police,” she said. “I backed away, screaming my lungs off. I was pretty scared. I was on my own; I thought I was going to get beaten up.” 

When she got back to her car, parked on a nearby road, it had been vandalised. When Ms Jones and one of the other activists tried to photograph the incident, they were assaulted by one of the men in the car, she claimed. “We tried to take photos of the men and I went towards their car with a male companion. A man with a beard jumped out of the car to try and get our phones. He was attacking my friend, had him in a body lock bear hug, punching him in the head. I was totally terrified.”  Roger Warner, master of the Ledbury Hunt, who is alleged to have been present at the altercation, has declined to comment.  Gloucestershire Police said officers working as part of Operation Themis were called to an incident around 11.30pm. A 38-year-old man from the Gloucester area was arrested on suspicion of common assault. He has been bailed until 4 Nov. 27 Sept

A programme to vaccinate badgers is forging ahead as Hampshire & Isle of Wight Trust fight back against the Whitehall cull. Late last year the Trust launched an urgent Badger Vaccination Appeal to raise £45,000 for a care package to protect local badgers and cattle from Bovine tuberculosis. And volunteers around W. Cornwall. Licensed volunteers trapped and vaccinated 7 badgers against the disease at a horse sanctuary near Pendeen.

Badger culling is to be banned on Derbyshire County Council land. The Labour-led authority has made the decision on the back of scientific evidence which suggests a badger cull would actually increase the spread of bovine tuberculosis. Hampshire councillors too overwhelmingly backed a motion to ban badger culling on county-owned land. And in Sussex the Green administration at Brighton and Hove City Council said it will look to block any proposed culling in the city and surrounding Downland should the Government look to expand the programme from its current pilot test area.  

Labour figures in the city have also called on the Government to axe their plans to cull badgers across the UK.  Sussex Wildlife Trust has already announced that it would not support any cull on its land although doubts have been raised by Government officials whether any locally stated ban would be enforceable.  Hove Tory MP Mike Weatherley signed an early day motion registering concerns about the cull and calling on Environment secretary to hold a Commons vote before any decision on a wider roll-out of the pilot badger cull is taken. He said: “Although I understand that many people are concerned about the effect that Bovine TB is having on farmers, I am not convinced that the culling of badgers is the right approach.

The first photographs have emerged of what appears to be a badger killed in the controversial culls. Secret World Wildlife Rescue, the Somerset-based animal charity that released the photographs of the badger, said it had been delivered to them by people on an overnight ‘badger patrol’ who reported seeing marksmen searching for the badger’s body in the early hours of Saturday morning. 

Defra told the Guardian it was “confident” that the animal had not been killed as part of the cull because all the badgers killed so far had died “instantly.” Dr Elizabeth Mullineaux, who is a consultant to the charity and has been a clinical vet for 17 years, said: “A single shot has entered left-hand side of the chest, slightly behind the Defra target area. Rather than going through perpendicular therefore to the heart and lungs, it went diagonally and out the side.”  X-rays of the animal showed fragments of the bullet, and what appeared to be “one track” between one entry and one exit point. She was of the opinion just one bullet had been used, leaving the stomach and liver lobe coming out of the “sizeable” exit hole.  She said it was hard to say how long the animal was alive for after being shot, apart from the fact it had time to take flight. The badger’s body will be post-mortemed and then DNA-checked to see if it matched DNA records of badgers within the zone, which were taken by Defra before the cull began.

Please listen to this talk on Sat 7^th Sept at the Taunton anti badger cull march by Dominic Dyer, who works for Care for the Wild and Born Free. There is a great deal of really important information in his talk that we can use against the badger cull and we should share this as widely as we possibly can. You will be surprised by some of the information. There is also a short contribution by the Director of the Badger Trust, Geoff Hayden. www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mxVO4-U3EU&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D1mxVO4-U3EU&nomobile=1

Secretive cull

I was pulled over by police twice in the space of 20 minutes last week for being “intimidating”. The second time officers said they had received a call from a member of the public who felt harassed by me. This member of the public was a large bloke driving a pick-up truck which was almost certainly laden with a high-calibre rifle. I was in a people carrier, armed only with a torch. He was enjoying an evening of paid employment killing badgers. I was enjoying an evening of paid employment seeking to discover a few details about the offensively secretive badger cull currently unfolding in the English countryside.

In an incident entirely typical of this cull, the gunman was helped to do his job by the police, who conveniently prevented me from doing mine. On both occasions, officers held me for far longer than it was necessary, to establish I was not breaking any law. This delay enabled the badger cullers to drive away into the darkness and continue their work without having to suffer the terror of a journalist. Farmers in the cull zone are doing themselves a huge disservice with their silence. Country dwellers complain how city types are utterly ignorant of their way of life, but without farmers’ voices it is impossible for the public to understand their point of view….. The people who really should be speaking, however, are Defra and Natural England.

This is supposedly a pilot cull but we do not have any information about how many badgers have been killed so far, how many have been injured, how the marksmen are ensuring clean kills, who is checking the badger body bags, how fiddling the figures or fraud will be prevented, whether there have been incidences of “unofficial” culling, and many other important details. How can we be sure they are doing these proper checks? – Extract from The Guardian 12^th Sept by Patrick Barkham

No “humane” criteria – The Government’s Chief Veterinary Officer, Nigel Gibbens, admitted there is “no definitive criteria” for measuring how humane the current pilot operations are.  He has admitted that ministers will have no hard and fast rules on what constitutes a humane kill when they come to decide whether the pilot badger cull has been a success. Defra has previously insisted any decision to roll the pilots out nationwide will significantly depend on whether killings have been humane.

This is supposed to be a scientifically monitored trial, but claims are being made that cannot be tested – sometimes frankly incredible claims, such as that the shooters are having a 100% clean kill rate.

A zoologist on patrol tells me that international studies of free shooting generally show “clean kill” rates of free-running wildlife less than 90%. “The highest I know of was a 92% rate of killing impala in S. Africa. And that was in daylight.” Badgers surely are being wounded and crawling away to die in agony.

Natalie Bennett, Green party leader

Inspector sacked – A farm inspector from Somerset who tweeted critical comments about the badger cull has been sacked after the NFU complained to ministers about her views. Janice Holland had worked for the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) since 2001, visiting farms to ensure claims for agricultural grants were not being falsified.

She made a series of remarks on Twitter suggesting she had serious concerns about animal welfare and that the cull was poorly conceived and executed. Ms Holland, who has 22 years’ service with government farming agencies, referred to Peter Kendall, the union’s president, as “Kim Jong Kendall” – a reference to the North Korean leader and a name already in use among anti-badger-cull protesters.

Defra said the NFU was a “stakeholder” and RPA staff should not criticise it in public. Labour MP Barry Sheerman said the sacking was “shameful”. This is Devon. 1 Oct

Dog attacked – ‘Camp Badger’ was in shock after a deliberate, unprovoked and viscous attempt to kill Ziggy, one of the dogs at Camp Badger, who was guarding a badger sett. He was lured away by men who made a deliberate attempt to kill him by severing his femoral artery with a knife.  Luckily the dog managed to escape but still sustained 2 knife wounds and was taken to a vet.

May the name of Escott Farm forever live in infamy!

Above – The Message to PM Cameron – Hands Off Our Badgers !

Filed under: CAMPAIGNS - Global Animal Welfare Issues, GENERAL NEWS - International / National / Regional | Leave a comment »