Following the news that shooters involved in the badger cull in Somerset are failing to kill the numbers of badgers required to fulfil their quotas, Mark Jones, veterinarian and Executive Director of Humane Society International said the government should have rejected the policy.
“It comes as no surprise that the badger cull is failing in its efforts to devastate badger populations in the pilot areas. This unjustified policy has been a shambles from the outset. It deeply saddens me that even one badger has to suffer and die for the sake of political expediency. The government should have rejected this policy from the start, and instead focused on more progressive, humane, and science-based solutions to the problem of TB in cattle. Now it must abandon this travesty that has already cost farmers and the taxpayer dear and caused deep divisions within our communities.”
But DEFRA said there was no 'single solution' and badger culls alone would not solve the problem of TB in cattle: "There is no single solution and they represent part of a comprehensive plan that the government is taking to arrest the increase in new bovine TB cases. Coupled with tighter cattle movement controls, improvements in testing, good biosecurity, and continued investment in vaccination, culling will have a significant impact.
"Science tells us that badger culling can play a significant positive role in reducing the spread of TB. The decision by ministers was taken based on the best available scientific evidence after over 15 years of intensive research. This week the Irish Department of Agriculture reported that bovine TB in cattle had fallen to “historically low levels” after almost 25 years of culling badgers. Culling has contributed towards the 50% reduction in TB incidence in Ireland since 2000."
Jones said: "DEFRA is also in breach of a legally binding decision of the Information Commissioner, who ordered DEFRA to release information to HSI UK on exactly how ‘humaneness’ was to be measured and assessed during the pilot culls. The legally binding deadlines for DEFRA to release the information, or appeal the decision, have both passed, but as yet no appeal has been lodged and HSI UK has received no further information.
"DEFRA has used every cynical tactic in the book to prevent disclosure of the methods and criteria it will use to assess humaneness in the pilot culls. We can only assume it knows that independent scrutiny would find the methodology to be full of holes in exactly the same way that eminent scientists have declared the cull to be nothing more than a ‘costly distraction’.
"The vast majority of shooting appears to be taking place without any monitoring whatsoever, only a fraction of badger carcasses are being collected for examination, the extreme suffering of wounded badgers who will die slowly underground is unmeasurable and nobody outside of DEFRA's internal team has been allowed to examine or question its methods. With this level of unjustified animal suffering, DEFRA must not be allowed to stick two fingers up at transparency and get away with it."
