The badger looks so peaceful lying there. It might have curled up and fallen asleep on the grass verge of the busy A65 between Ilkley and Skipton, rather than been the victim of a road accident.

"Often there's hardly a mark on them," says Peter Britton, wildlife officer for Bradford Council. "Badgers have extremely thick and heavy skin, so visually they seem to take an impact quite well. But physically they are as vulnerable as anything else when hit by a vehicle, which often happens because of their tendency to stand and confront whatever danger they see coming towards them, unlike rabbits and foxes which usually bolt away from headlights."

Twenty badgers are known to have been killed by cars and lorries in the Bradford area alone over the past 12 months, and well over 100 more in other parts of Yorkshire.

Although each fatality is deeply regretted by wildlife lovers, the dead animals do at least perform a service
that lifts the threat of culling from Yorkshire's badger population, a threat that hangs over many thousands of badgers further south and in Wales.

Each road casualty is taken away and tested to find out if it is carrying bovine tuberculosis, a disease which led to 4,000 cases being identified last year requiring more than 28,000 cattle being destroyed – mostly in the West Country. According to the Government's Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), that figure constitutes a rise of nearly 20 per cent on 2006, and recently a House of Commons committee warned that if left uncontrolled bovine TB could spread through the whole of the UK in the next four years. It recommended that farmers should be allowed to shoot or trap badgers under licence from Natural England.

And earlier this month the Welsh assembly announced that it intended to cull badgers.

Since 1975, more than 30,000 badgers have been killed by Government vets in response to local outbreaks in the South-West, Wales and parts of the Midlands. At first they used a powder which produced hydrogen cyanide gas in setts, but research showed that this was not a humane option and since 1982 badgers have been cage-trapped then shot.

But there is a growing debate over whether badger culling is an effective way to deal with the disease. After hunting with hounds, it is the most hotly controversial issue in the countryside.

Many believe that badgers are being unfairly singled out for blame. They point the finger at farmers for bad hygiene practices and a careless attitude towards transporting cattle around the
the UK.

Indeed, last year the Government's own independent advisers on bovine TB said that killing badgers would probably not be cost-effective because the culling would have to be so large and widespread. Instead, there should be tighter control on cattle movements to try and stop the disease's geographical expansion away from known hotspots like Devon and Cornwall.

So far, the badgers killed on Yorkshire roads have all tested negative for bovine TB.

Peter Britton says that crude autopsies are performed on road casualties in the Bradford area to look at the condition of their lymph nodes.

"If the nodes look chalky, that could well be an indicator that the unfortunate badger was carrying the disease. If we're not sure, we ask a veterinary surgeon to give us a second opinion."

In the 25 years since Peter has been responsible for the work, not one badger has tested positive for bovine TB, and it's a situation that everyone involved with region's badgers prays
will continue.

Badgers have been doing well in Yorkshire since the Badger Act of 1992 outlawed the so-called sport of badger-baiting, which involved terriers like Airedales and Staffordshire Bulls being sent down into setts while with the dogs' owners bet on the outcome of the badger fight.

However, there has been a recent revival of the practice in the Bradford area, and badger groups are now mounting guards on most setts. At some, discreetly positioned CCTV cameras are being used.

But the damage they cause to badgers is nothing compared to what would happen if bovine TB in the North was linked to badgers.

Liz Groves of the Craven Badger Group says there is a fear that if large-scale culling is ordered in the usual bovine TB areas to the south of Staffordshire, farmers in other regions might believe they can also take out their local badgers.

"I'm a farmer's daughter, so I can see both sides," she says, "and I understand the farmers' plight. But I also see the state of some of their cows. That's where government policy should
be directed."

Conservationists argue that although there is a likely to be a link of some kind between badgers and TB in cattle, it is just as likely that the cattle are responsible for infecting badger populations rather than vice versa.

In Yorkshire and the North- East, the National Farmers' Union has developed a policy to protect herds from infection. This includes testing cattle for TB every two years rather than the usual four-year cycle, and more testing of badgers killed in road accidents.

The NFU president, Peter Kendall, says: "Ridding our countryside of bovine TB may be a long-term objective. If everyone with the slightest concern for wildlife or livestock farming works together, we can defeat it. There is nothing we want more than a population of healthy badgers and cattle."