SOME years ago I was walking in a wood with my brother when we came across a badger caught in a snare.
The noose was round the middle of the animal’s body rather than its neck and it had obviously been trapped for some time. It was very angry and very strong and it took the two of us some time to release it.
It was a lucky badger. Every night 6,000 badger snares are set in this country and 115,000 animals have been killed since 1984. Badgers are a protected species under Irish and European law but this slaughter is being carried out legally under a derogation as part of a programme attempting to eradicate TB in cattle.
Waste of money
This year the disease eradication programme will employ 75 staff and cost €70 million — and there’s growing evidence that the money is wasted because badger culling doesn’t work.
Scotland is now TB free and achieved this without culling badgers. Instead they used stringent testing, strict movement controls and better farming practices — improving drinking troughs and fences and gates. Northern Ireland once had the highest rate of bovine TB in Europe. They’ve copied the Scottish example and already they’ve halved their TB rate without culling.
In England they invested £70m in a 12-year research project into links between badgers and bovine TB. It concluded that badger culling was worse than useless as a control measure. In certain cases it actually increases TB incidence because of a phenomenon called ‘perturbation’ —- badgers disturbed by persecution enter the territories of other badgers and spread the disease. However, there’s still an on-going controversy in England about whether culling should be resumed. The Welsh Assembly is due to debate the issue in the next couple of months.
Barbaric practice
Meanwhile in Ireland we continue to spend huge sums of money on a practice which is barbaric, old-fashioned and has shown no positive results in terms of a reduction in TB levels. It’s high time something was done about this.
In fact something is being done. The Irish Wildlife Trust (IWT) is mounting a campaign to persuade Minister for Agriculture Simon Coveney to change his department’s policy on badger culling. The campaign includes an online petition which you can sign (see below). In other parts of the world similar petitions have been successful in changing official policy. The IWT is a charitable conservation organisation and its website contains further information about badgers. There is more information on the Badgerwatch website.
There are no accurate figures for the number of badgers in this country but there are probably between 72,000 and 95,000 individual animals. This means that culling operations on the scale that has occurred over the past 25 years are likely to have had a significant effect on population levels in some parts of the country.
The link between TB in badgers and TB in cattle probably does exist, although it’s likely that it’s only a minor cause of infection in cattle. The disease is serious and affects our national economy as well as the income of individual farmers. International examples show that it’s possible to eradicate it. The fact that we’ve been trying to do this for decades without success is proof that our strategy is wrong.
I like badgers and I think they’re an important part of our wildlife heritage. But if I was convinced that slaughtering them would benefit our national livestock herd I wouldn’t be signing this petition. But I’ve weighed up the scientific evidence on both sides of the argument and I’m now convinced that Irish badgers are innocent scapegoats.
