24th October 2007

Glos farmers will continue to suffer

The Green Party today criticised the the government's Chief Scientific Advisor's recommendation that culls of badgers should be carried out to control the TB epidemic in cattle.

Photo: Green party action last year in Stroud High Street 

Sir David King said on Monday that culling badgers was the 'best option available at the moment to reduce the reservoir of infection in wildlife'. His recommendation is in stark contrast to the views of the Independent Scientific Group report into the matter - a near 10-year government study of badger-culling which found that culling could 'make no meaningful contribution.' (i)

Stroud Green party mounted a local campaign last year against the cull which included a life size badger in the High Street (ii), a detailed submission to the consultation and collecting many hundreds of letters: some 47,000 people in all wrote from across the country with 95% being against a cull.

Cllr Martin Whiteside, Parliamentary spokesperson for Stroud Green party said: "Culling badgers to control the spread of TB in cattle appears to be completely counter-productive. A culling-based TB strategy in South-West England led to an increase in cases amongst cattle, and to cases developing in areas that had previously been free of the disease. Badger culling is a distraction – and the uncomfortable truth is that bovine TB is more likely to be spread between cattle kept in crowded quarters. The answer is more likely to lie in improving animal welfare standards.”

Dr Caroline Lucas, a Green MEP and former vice-president of the EU’s committee of inquiry into the UK’s foot and mouth disease outbreak in 2001, said: “We need a rational, evidence-based policy for halting the spread of bovine TB, 80 per cent of which is caused by cattle-to-cattle infection and has nothing whatsoever to do with badgers. In the remaining cases, culling badgers could be increasing the range of neighbouring populations, causing the disease to spread more widely.”

Cllr Philip Booth, who helped organise the Green party campaign last year, said: "Culling badgers is cruel and makes no sense. It is no wonder so many including the Royal Society, Sir David Attenborough, RSPCA, Badger Trusts, Soil Association and many others are against a cull. The government's own scientists have agreed saying that the way to address the disease is to reapply the strict TB testing and movement controls in cattle. And indeed the new stricter controls on cattle movements and pre-movement testing appear to be working. But the testing regime still doesn’t identify all infected cattle: cases continue to be discovered at abattoirs, from ‘clean’ herds. Tackling this hidden reservoir is where the real urgency lies. A cull means yet more public money will be wasted, ordinary farmers will continue to suffer, and even more badgers and cattle will die unnecessarily."

Notes for Editors

(i) To see the full report please download it here

(ii) See action here and link to Green party's online report