A short and very angry post.
I can scarcely find the words and had to make myself watch Rob Pownall of Protect the Wild’s video about this. Another member of our badger group has said that it made her feel physically sick. Disgusting, craven, spineless …
As Rob says, politicians just can’t admit that they have been wrong. 230,000 badgers have paid with their lives already, now there will be tens of thousands more, all for absolutely no reason or purpose. Again they are talking about vaccinating badgers, which I have always been against: a) just leave them alone, and b) it casts them quite wrongly as the villains. The villains are the National Farmers’ Union who instead of doing anything at all about hygiene and bio-security and strict controls of cattle movement simply blame badgers, which is easier and cheaper. Progress with cattle testing, which at the moment is still not fit for purpose, has been painfully, glacially slow. As Brian May showed in his tv programme on the subject, just one gram of slurry is enough to infect a cow with bovine tuberculosis. It seems highly likely that because the testing is so useless, the disease is far more widespread than we know. The only thing we know for sure is that the cull hasn’t worked, at all. It probably makes things worse. The extremely powerful NFU cannot, mustn’t be upset. I cannot help wondering if there was some sort of trade-off agreed behind closed doors: we’ll take the IHT hit without too much fuss but you have to let us carry on murdering badgers. I think farmers may have been rather surprised that they did not get the public support they expected with regard to inheritance tax – many people will not have known about the exemption and are deeply puzzled by it.
Millions of pounds of public money have been wasted and, completely ignoring the evidence yet again, an opportunity for real change (as opposed to the nonsensical and meaningless “step change” talked about by government) has been missed. It is nothing less than the continuation of a travesty and a tragedy.
I make no apology for using the trailcam photo at the head of this post again since it is so unusual to see these beautiful creatures out in daylight.
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