£660 per badger in a vaccination scheme that might do nothing to tackle TB
Here's food for thought for all the pro-badger groups complaining that the cost of the forthcoming pilot culls is excessive – figures from Wales showing that the vaccination programme there has so far cost more than £660 an animal.
And this, let's remind ourselves, for an operation that is seriously flawed and comes with no guarantee it will do anything about making inroads into the huge TB problem Wales is now gripped by.
Having been scared off culling by a few hard-core campaigners and their supporters in the Assembly government, the authorities in Wales have so far managed to vaccinate 1,424 badgers in the north Pembrokeshire intensive action area.
But here's the nub of it – no one can tell what percentage of the region's badger population this represents. And as farmers' leaders are pointing out, it may well be that many of the animals trapped and vaccinated were already infected.
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So who is going to stand up and defend a policy which is not only costly, not only hit-and-miss, but whose effectiveness no one can judge? Only the usual suspects – the Brian Mays and the other hand-wringers who are entirely happy to see farmers put out of business, who are entirely happy that the taxpayer has had to fork out for a likely 40,000 cattle slaughterings last year, who are equally entirely happy for thousands of their cherished badgers to die painfully and slowly from the effects of TB and who are entirely happy for meat and milk production to be threatened as never before.
The same ones, as has been shown recently, who manipulate the statistics to try to fool the public into believing that TB is in retreat when the reality is that it is still rampaging out of control and that we are likely to see a massive resurgence of cases this spring.
The word from the Government is that ministers are not prepared to even think about evaluating alternative methods of tackling the badger menace until the early summer culls are completed and the results assessed.
But let's just not forget one thing: those two pilot culls will not be assessed in terms of their impact on local TB cases. They are merely being staged in order to assess the effectiveness of free shooting of badgers. So by the time the results are in and have been collated, it's going to be at least a year before Owen Paterson can press the button for a national cull to go ahead – another year for TB to have tightened its grip on herds.
It hardly fills me with any confidence that the Government and its advisers have really grasped the full extent of the problem or are doing anything apart from obeying their political masters in Brussels when it comes to tackling it.
Very sad to hear of the sudden death of Phil Cook this week. He was one of the most experienced and respected members of the dairy sector in the West Country and is going to leave a massive void. Our condolences to his family.
2 Comments
by E_Badger
Friday, February 08 2013, 10:11PM
“Anyone who reads the Welsh goverment published accounts will soon realise that the figure quoted per badger bandied by the pro-cull brigade includes costs associated with training, health and safety, certification and even training accommodation.
The actual amount to vaccinate a badger, for one shot of vaccine ... £12.”
by Clued-Up
Thursday, February 07 2013, 7:40PM
“This seems to be a reprint of an article authored by Derek Mead, one of the two Directors of a company set up last summer to cash in on the government's badger killing project.
Mead is a farmer and property developer - he appears to have no professional qualifications as a scientist and no understanding of scientific method. A Google check of Mead's past comments about badgers suggests he strongly dislikes them (not surprising, he's a developer and the existence of an active badger sett has scuppered a number of planning applications).
Mead believes his fellow DIrector (Bryan Hill - a farmer who also has no scientific training or experience) can distinguish badgers with infectious TB from healthy badgers without carrying out the appropriate laboratory tests on each animal. Scientists, vets and TB specialists say they're both wrong. DEFRA are unimpressed.”