Shooting badgers may not help. Photo / Getty Images
Ministers are poised to give the go-ahead to a cull of Britain's badgers in a bid to halt the growing spread of tuberculosis in cattle - with a significant gap remaining in the science behind the move.
After nearly 15 years of argument about the links between badgers and
bovine TB, the Environment Secretary, Caroline Spelman, is expected to bow to farmers' demands and recommend a cull to Prime Minister David Cameron.
If the Prime Minister and his Cabinet agree to what will be an unpopular move with animal lovers, groups of farmers will be licensed to organise the shooting of badgers in selected areas in the West Country, the worst-affected region, where nearly a quarter of all cattle farms were hit by TB infections last year. Perhaps tens of thousands of badgers will be killed over four years.
It is widely accepted by scientists that badgers are a significant source of TB infection in cattle. But officials from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) admit a significant unknown factor remains about the policy of "free-shooting" likely to be employed - that is, the shooting of free-roaming badgers by trained marksmen at night.
The problem is the phenomenon known as "perturbation" that would result from the shooting - where survivors of a partly-culled family group of badgers wander about the countryside, spreading TB as they go - and actually making the disease situation worse.
This was discovered in the decade-long badger culling trials run by the Government, which caused them to be abandoned. Subsequent research showed, Defra officials say, the "perturbation effect" diminished
but this was only with the technique used in the trials - shooting badgers after they had been trapped in cages. Cage-trapping and shooting costs about 2500 ($4850) a square kilometre a year, as opposed to about 200 for free-shooting.
- Independent
