UK (England) Badger Cull (What a Complete and Utter Farce) News
SAV Comment –
In many ways that you can see in the following badger cull articles; the same can easily be applied to the very wrong stray dog killings as we have said for so many years in places such as Serbia and Romania, to name but two. For the very short term; a matter of weeks, local government and politicians may rejoice in the fact that their killing all or many stray animals in their local area may appear to be the ‘perfect solution’ for stray animal eradication in a region. But within a very short time, a matter of just a few weeks, as we see with UK badgers; the ‘void’ created by animals ‘removed’ from a region by a cull simply acts as a lure to animals in other areas / regions who see the opportunity for better conditions and the possibility of accessing more food. In their migration to newly culled areas, animals from outside the region may bring with them new diseases which have not previously been experienced in the ‘cull zone’. Without sterilisation, the animals which are new to the area then commence reproduction to get stray numbers back up to, or even higher than they were per-cull. In addition, a cull region may now have additional diseases in stray animals in their area which it did not have pre-cull.
So, does simply killing stray animals en masse in any region or city make sense ? – NO.
Sterilising strays and working with a management plan to sterilise, identify (tag) animals as having been sterilised; and perform general health checks on every animal at the time of their sterilisation. Over time this application will gradually reduces stray populations.
Sterilised animals do NOT reproduce – a cull may look like it has done the job, but when un sterilised strays migrate into the region from other areas, the issue starts again; and the stray animals numbers do NOT reduce over time; if anything, they increase !
So why do regions and their governments not do effective stray animal population management ? – the word is ‘CORRUPTION’, and in politics, that is a difficult disease to cure.
Maybe in this case we would make an exception and support a cull – of corrupt politicians !!!
The UK Badger Cull
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.
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.
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.
On Mon 7th Oct, after 6 weeks of night-time shooting, the marksmen’s guns fell silent and the Somerset badger cull officially ended. BUT the government has said they’ll extend the cull by 3 weeks in order to try and achieve the target figure
An online petition, begun by (Queen guitarist) Dr. 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 7th Sept.
See some of our previous posts about Brian and the English badger cull in general via the following links:
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 1st
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 4th Sept
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