The Badger Cull may well come to Cheshire very soon and is going ahead
in many counties and being put down by many scientist and wildlife
experts as totally wrong and ineffective. Thousands of people from all
over the country are protesting in many forms from march's to direct
action supported by prominent people like Sir David Attenborough,, Chris Packham, Brian May
A note on the badger cull is worth including here; the policy is being
carried out in ten zones this year, with an upper limit of 14,213
badgers set by the licenses, and there's every indication it'll be
carried out in South Cheshire in 2017. The given reason is to tackle
bovine tuberculosis (bTB), a disease affecting cattle herds. Advocates
of badger culling participate at their peril; there's very little
scientific evidence to suggest this will help them at all, and in fact
the opposite is likely to be true in some cases. In the Randomised
Badger Culling Trial, a previous experiment that cost us 11,000+ badgers
and £50 million, the conclusion was that badger culling makes no
meaningful contribution to bTB control; in some areas of this experiment
it even increased the disease prevalence.
This seems to be the situation now; bTB has increased in each of the
three cull zones from 2015 if stats from May 2015 vs May 2016 are
compared. The current cull has also cost us approximately £25 million
for approximately 4,000 badgers (none of which are tested for bTB at
all) according to DEFRA statistics reported in 'Badgered To Death', the
new book of Dominic Dyer, current CEO of The Badger Trust. Because they
aren't tested, there is absolutely no data on how prevalent the disease
is amongst the badgers that are being killed. Perhaps if they were
tested, it would make it even clearer that the disease is an issue
stemming from the poor husbandry of intensively farmed cattle,
subsequently spilling out into many wild hosts as what is essentially
industrial pollution, infecting not just badgers, but rats, hedgehogs,
otters & deer as well. Warning you may find this video disturbing as badgers are often shot
and scream for a long time in agony before they die and it can be a
mother and her young will starve to death would farmers do this to their
cattle?
It cost £7000 to cull a badger £300 to inoculate Under a vaccination
programme being used in Wales, around 25,000 badgers could have been
vaccinated for the same cost of killing just under 2,500 in
Gloucestershire and Somerset, according to Dyer. The badger vaccine
doesn't kill any TB but stops them infecting anything so those with TB
die leaving health badgers. The TB test for cattle is ineffective many
are killed as they show positive only to find on post mortem they were
clean it is also very painful for cows. Many if not all Badgers killed may not be infected with TB
The policy is unlikely to be stopped by appealing to the common sense of
those who have already ignored the warnings of countless researchers
& experts that have examined the evidence. But wildlife lovers in
& around South Cheshire still have plenty they can do to help stop
this;
How can you Help Save Badgers?
Join us at Cheshire Against The Cull, and learn how to identify, map, monitor & protect badger setts,
as well as help with campaigning. The loaned cages that were being used
by conservationists in order to vaccinate badgers in Cheshire have been
recalled by the Government to instead kill them.
We can be contacted on Facebook or by email at http://tinyurl.com/gu6uahu
email Click Here to Send us a Mail cheshireagainstthecull@hotmail.com.
We’d also recommend you sign the current government e- petition to stop the cull - http://tinyurl.com/z4bn8du.
Finally, we’ll leave you with the statement given to Professor John
Bourne by a senior government official… ‘Fine John, we accept your
science. But we have to offer the farmers a carrot and the only carrot
we can possibly give them is culling badgers’.
If anyone knows of a badger sett in Cheshire please let us know with as much detail as possible so we can inspect and protect it you can use the form
foxyform http://www.crewetown.co.uk/inform.htm
