As previously discussed, Tim Bonner of the Countryside Alliance made a complete fool of himself by trying to stop the BBC from broadcasting the programme on the grounds that it was biased, before he had even seen it. Since I hadn’t seen it either, I made no claim that it wasn’t biased, but now that I have I wish it had been less even-handed than it was.
Of course I am delighted that the programme was made and aired in the sense that it may have been highly revealing to those who still believe that badgers give bTB to cows, rather than the other way around (and who can blame them, that is what government and the media have been telling them for years?) Brian May was extraordinarily reasonable and conciliatory and I understand his reasons, but sadly I fear that the National Farmers’ Union and the Countryside Alliance (which represents the hunting and shooting industries) are not interested in reason, or science, they have their own, hidden, self-interested agendas. I just wish that Brian May had been angrier, showed more righteous indignation at this terrible, scandalous tragedy.
Farmers who claimed to have completely closed herds and that therefore the disease could only have come to their farms from wildlife suddenly remembered a bull they had brought in a couple of years ago. He may have tested clean, but we now know the tests are beyond inadequate, they simply don’t work.
The main conduit for transmission has now been shown to be slurry, which farmers spray not only on their own fields but also on those belonging to neighbouring farms. How that is legal or ever thought to have been bio-secure is anyone’s guess. I have been reliably informed by Anne Brummer of Brian May’s Save Me Trust that she has seen calves literally being born in slurry. So, infected slurry has been sprayed everywhere and then sometimes ploughed into the land.
We saw a farmer breaking down in tears when one of his dairy cows tested positive, a “reactor”, destined for slaughter, and of course it isn’t that I have absolutely no sympathy for farmers and the mental health issues some suffer as a result of their losses, but there was no mention in the programme of the fact that these cows are destined for slaughter anyway as soon as they stop producing sufficient milk (typically at between four and six years old, around a quarter of their natural lifespan), no mention of their calves being snatched from them at birth for the veal industry, nor of the fact that farmers receive full market value compensation for each cow they lose. The picture of the dairy industry was way too rosy for my liking. I am surely not alone in finding it extraordinary that the farming industry is singled out for compensation in this way and for subsidies. If most other businesses suffer setbacks or losses, they either get through it or they go the wall.
I would love to see an NFU spokesperson saying something along these lines: “Our terrible faming methods and practices, poor hygiene and lack of bio-security, have infected our land, the very soil, and our beautiful, precious wildlife with bTB. I am so sorry, we had no idea that what we do would cause so much devastation. At the NFU we can hardly live with ourselves knowing that we are responsible for the unnecessary deaths of quarter of a million badgers.” But of course that won’t happen – they see the land, the countryside, as theirs and theirs alone, to do with as they please, and they will keep doing things the in same way in which they have for generations, as they are always so eager to tell us.
The cull, clearly, has not worked, at all. But it has carried on entirely regardless of the facts and the science.
Hugo Rifkind, whose articles in The Times I usually enjoy, reviewed the programme in an extraordinary way, in essence suggesting that quarter of a million badgers didn’t matter and that Brian May was “tonto” for caring. For those of us who do care about wildlife, our great hope has been for a change of government. The Labour manifesto promised an end to the cull which was even described therein as “ineffective”. It was a false hope and we have been betrayed. Just as Tony Bliar’s (sic) government betrayed us on every aspect of animal welfare.
See:
Your Neighbour Kills Puppies; Inside the Animal Liberation Movement – Animal Wild
In Wales, the cull was ended in very short order, but in England existing licences to 2026 will remain in place and already Natural England has begun a consultation on an application for a new cull in Cumbria. If the NFU were not so very, terrifyingly powerful, the application should simply have been returned with a short note asking why on earth it had been sent in, given that the new government had promised to end the cull altogether. There is even talk of a return to the proposed policy of total badger eradication in certain areas. I am beginning to think the CA and the NFU will not be happy until they are extinct in this country – and then perhaps they will move on to deer, who can also be carriers, but probably not, I think it is safe to assume, foxhounds.
There is a national day of action protesting the cull to take place, organised by the Badger Trust on September 3rd, which will include lobbying parliament. I wish I could say that I thought there was even a smidgeon of hope that it will make the slightest bit of difference.
Leave a Reply