David Attenborough: badger cull could worsen TB in cattle
Vaccination is the only long-term solution to the problem of bovine TB, says the naturalist and broadcaster
A badger cull could worsen bovine TB in cattle, says David Attenborough. Photograph: Rex FeaturesThe naturalist and broadcaster added his voice to the doubts of many scientists and conservationists before the government's expected confirmation on Monday of a proposed controversial cull of badgers to reduce bovine TB in cattle.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is set to allow farmers to form their own collectives for the "free shooting" of badgers in areas where cattle herds are affected by bovine TB, which is widely blamed by farmers on badgers carrying the disease.
"You may think that culling is the answer and it sounds easy to start with but it can very well make things much worse," warned Attenborough. "Survivors will carry the disease into areas that have hitherto been unaffected. There's good scientific research available to show that culling badgers can make things worse and not better."
Government scientists have concluded that this "perturbation effect" disappears with time after a prolonged culling of badgers. However, a decade of data collected from 10 trial badger culls in the west country in which 11,000 badgers were killed produced a modest average reduction in confirmed TB incidents in cattle of between 12% and 16%. Localised badger culling can more than double the risk of TB infecting cattle, according to a Medical Research Council study published on Wednesday.
Defra's chief scientific adviser and chief veterinary officer have both recommended that large-scale culls over areas of at least 150 sq/km with the co-operation of at least 70% of the landowners in the area would help reduce the incidence of TB in cattle. They also concluded that free shooting, or "controlled shooting", rather than trapping in cages and then shooting badgers, would be the most cost-effective way to do it. Free shooting is calculated to cost £200 per square kilometre compared with £2,500 for cage-trapping and shooting.
Attenborough said there were "very serious consequences" of allowing free shooting of badgers in the countryside at night but expressed sympathy for farmers who saw a 7.5% rise in new incidents of TB in cattle last year. Most farmers are in favour of a badger cull after controls over cattle movement, the slaughter of infected cattle and better biosecurity on farms have failed to stem the spread of the disease, which has cost the government more than £500m in compensation over the past 10 years.
"It's a no-win situation all way round. It sounds very pompous to say I have sympathy with farmers but one clearly does," said Attenborough. "The poor farmer has to put down animals that he cares for daily. Who am I, a townie, to tell people what to do or even to comment on what they do? All I'm saying is the latest research seems to suggest that [a cull] is likely to make things worse rather than better. Something has to be done. What has to be done is get a proper vaccine to enable us to inoculate badger populations."
Lord Krebs, a key scientific expert who recommended the badger culling trial 14 years ago and recently met with Defra to discuss the latest evidence, said this week that culling did not seem an effective way of controlling the disease when it only reduced TB in cattle by 12% to 16%. "So you leave 85% of the problem still there, having gone to a huge amount of trouble to cull a huge number of badgers," he said.
Asked if he thought a policy of badger culling would be a mistake, Krebs said he thought it would be.
A badger vaccine was licenced last year and field trials found the BCG vaccine reduced the incidence of bovine TB in badgers by 73.8%.
No scientific experiments have yet shown what effect that has on reducing bovine TB in cattle but the National Trust is this year beginning a £320,000, four-year programme of badger vaccinations on its 20 sq km Killerton Estate in Devon.
Defra believes it would be too expensive to trap and vaccinate badgers as a response to the disease.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jul/14/david-attenborough-badger-cull?intcmp=239
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