It is perfectly natural to find the prospect of a badger cull distasteful. As we report, culling may begin as early as tomorrow night across 58 square miles of Gloucestershire and Somerset. It is estimated that some 5,000 badgers will be shot, and more will be killed every year over the next four years. Opponents call the plan barbaric, and police are bracing themselves for angry, even violent, protests.
But this is one of those difficult issues where the head must triumph over the heart, for the bovine TB carried by infected badgers is a terrible disease that must be brought under control. It is unpleasant, of course, for the infected badgers – which die a slow, painful death and which spread the disease to the environment around them. The impact upon farm animals is terrible; in the past decade, around 305,000 cattle have been slaughtered because of bovine TB. For the farmers involved, this means losing animals that they have carefully reared, each outbreak costing an average of £34,000 per farm. They have to fall back upon compensation payments that they complain do not reflect the full market price of the animal, although it still costs the taxpayer more than £90 million a year. Figures from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs suggest that Britain has spent £500 million tackling bovine TB since 2003.
The root of the problem is that Labour stopped the annual badger cull when it came to power in 1997. The result was that larger and larger numbers of cattle needed to be killed instead. In 1997, just 3,384 cattle were slaughtered because they had contracted bovine TB. Ten years later, it was 26,882. Between 1995 and 2010, the percentage of herds with some incidence of TB rose from 0.8 per cent to 9 per cent. The consequences of inaction are sadly obvious: allowing a relatively small number of badgers to escape the cull leads to slaughter of cattle on a much larger scale.
The failure of opponents of the cull to register this fact highlights a profound misunderstanding about how the countryside works. It is a tough place where difficult decisions often have to be made. Cull opponents can often see nature as something that exists wild and autonomous from man, in constant need of protection from greedy human exploitation. A significant proportion of such activists are town dwellers who lack sympathy for the men and women that make their living off the land.
By contrast, those who live in the heart of the countryside understand that nature requires good management in order to flourish. The British landscape looks and functions the way it does thanks to hundreds of years of farming. For example, hedgerows were originally planted to divide the land into fields and pens, marking the boundaries between farms and parishes – creating a thriving habitat for trees, shrubs, songbirds, voles and mice that is maintained by farmers. The mark of man’s architecture of the natural environment is also found in the green belts that surround urban areas, of which about 60 per cent is in agricultural use. Part of the role of the farmer is to sustain balances within nature, to make sure that diseases or aggressive species do not ruin their surrounding environment. Controlling the spread of bovine TB is similar in principle to controlling the spread of crop killers like blight or mould.
Those who disagree and who object to the badger cull of course have a right to have their voices heard. But they have to grasp that the alternative they are fighting for – the use of vaccines – simply won’t work. Vaccinating all badgers is not only a logistical nightmare but would have no effect on those that are already sick, while a more effective cattle vaccine is some 10 years away. And those radicals who will not listen to reason and who threaten vandalism cloaked in that standard, ominous euphemism of “direct action” will have to be resisted – doubtless at significant cost to the taxpayer. The nihilism of their actions betrays how fundamentally wrong-headed their cause is. The cull, regrettably, must go ahead.
