Sponsored by
Region’s farmers welcome plans for badger culls
FARMERS in Yorkshire have welcomed plans to shoot badgers in west or south west England, claiming it will reduce the risk of bovine TB spreading to the region.
The Government has decided to go ahead with two six-week pilots of badger culls in a bid to try to stem the disease which led to nearly 25,000 cattle being slaughtered in England last year and is set to cost taxpayers £1bn over 10 years. If they are successful, the move could lead to licences being issued for up to 10 culls a year for four years.
Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman said bovine TB was having a “devastating impact” on farmers and rural communities and said the decision to pilot culls was based on science. Vaccines for badgers, which carry the disease, and cattle are still years away, but animal welfare groups are horrified and policing a cull would cost £500,000 a year in each area.
Barney Kay, regional director of the National Farmers’ Union, said: “We are fortunate in this part of the world, that the vast majority of the region is relatively unaffected by this terrible disease that last year resulted in 32,000 cattle being slaughtered in affected areas. However we are seeing it march inexorably northwards and that is obviously something we are very concerned about.”
Shadow Environment Secretary Mary Creagh, the Wakefield MP, said the move was “bad news for wildlife, bad news for farmers and bad news for the taxpayer”.
Email to a friend
Print this page- Leeds lose Ward to Palace: Is there anyone they can afford now?
- Sheffield Wednesday leaving it late to hijack Leeds United over Ward
- As Snodgrass dithers over Leeds, Warnock throws a lifeline
- Ball is in Leeds United’s court over contract - Snodgrass
- Police turning blind eye to Asian voter fraud, says MP
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Yorkshire
Saturday 26 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 9 C to 23 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
Wind direction: East
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 9 C to 23 C
Wind Speed: 15 mph
Wind direction: East
Comments
There are 1 comments to this article
Page 1 of 1
Spritely
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 01:44 PMNow let's think: how far typically do badgers wander when foraging? About a mile. How far do cattle go in lorries and how often? Hundreds of miles and (taking the 10 million total of cattle) tens of thousands of times annually. Annual cattle movements, from farm to farms, to different land holdings, to shows, markets and so on, literally total millions every year. As many of these cattle are at best poorly tested (the skin test is around 80 per cent effective--so it misses lots of disease) the risk of them passing disease on is very, very much greater than some imagined inexorable move north by diseased badgers. Yes, some badgers carry the disease and presumably play some part in disease transmission, but to find the root cause of the bTB problem you need only to look at farms, cattle management, and Defra's failure to impose much more rigorous testing and much tighter movements on cattle from farms with a history of reactors.
Page 1 of 1
Your view
Please sign in to be able to comment on this story.