In the bright spring sunshine, a crowd began to assemble around George V’s statue in Westminster. With the tragic events of the previous week still fresh in everyone’s mind the ‘badger army’ assembled. Over 250, on a Monday afternoon, clearly, shows the depth of feeling that still exists against the government’s badger cull policy.
At 3 pm the crowd fell silent, respectfully observing a one minute silence for PC Keith Palmer and those that lost their lives in the terrorist attack on Westminster just five days earlier.
Nigel Tolley then introduced the first speaker, Simon King, the originator of the petition. Simon’s talk was well informed and delivered, showing a detailed knowledge of the science and how it has been ‘sidelined’ to suit an industry led business objective to cull badgers rather than tackle the real problem of Bovine TB laying ‘latent’ in herds, the inaccuracy of the SICCT testing (around 50% detection) so herds can be TB free with infectious cattle undetected within the herd.
Dominic Dyer CEO of the Badger Trust built the crowd up with his fastpaced, passionate speech, getting lots of interaction – Isn’t that right? – before Mark Jones, a veterinarian, working for Born Free Foundation said ‘he never believed five years ago that we would still here debating the culling of badgers and the inhumane free shooting methods. Dr Iain McGill veterinarian, delivered a passionate speech that focussed on Bovine TB in cattle, badgers and now Hunting hounds, BSE (Mad cow disease) and how, these diseases are linked together in cause and how the government and farming industry have tried to ‘suppress’ the news becoming public – potentially condemning more wild, domestic and farm animals to infection. Luke Steele, Animal Aid, concluded the speakers with a fact filled – fast paced talk – that exposed the shocking practices of the dairy industry and the exploitation of cattle (and other animals) in the milk and meat supply trade.
With the debate due to begin, it was a quick walk to Westminster Hall to take a place in the gallery.
Simon King’s government e-petition gained nearly 110,000 signatures showing, the continued, overwhelming support from the British public for an end to killing badgers. It was the fifth time in five years that Wildlife NGO’s and groups have forced MP’s to debate the badger cull policy in parliament.
The debate was lead by Paul Flynn – MP Newport West, who opened with the following statement; “Since 2013, thousands of badgers have been killed in a Government cull attempting to control bovine TB. Against scientific advice & before a 4 year trial has completed, the government is now expanding the cull to new counties—tens of thousands of healthy badgers could be killed.
Experts in disease control and animal welfare agree that pilot badger culls have proven both ineffective and inhumane. Shooting badgers is expensive, costing tax-payers some £5,000 per animal. Bovine TB is a serious problem but killing badgers is not the solution, and could actually make the situation worse. It is a costly distraction from an effective solution incorporating vaccination, increased cattle movement control measures and improved testing.” He continued The UK Government say that they are using every tool in the box, but they are using the rusty tools out of a medieval box, such as the crudest way to diagnose—with a skin test rather than the other scientific tests available—and culling.
The other side of the debate was once again led by Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) and Richard Drax (South Dorset) both of whom own farms within current cull zones. Clifton-Brown said ‘My constituency is home to one of England’s largest cull zones, spanning the whole of the North Cotswolds. I take this opportunity to pay tribute to the hard work and effort displayed by my farmers, who have committed a great deal of time and money to maintaining and protecting their badger cull zone in the face of numerous attempts at sabotage. To all those who say that farmers are not in favour of the culls, I simply say: why did they go to such considerable effort and expense if they did not believe that culling works?
Richard Drax then made one of the most controversial and unsubstantiated comments of the day claiming that “those who oppose the cull look at the badger as a friendly, lovable animal, which in effect it is not? Factually, the badger is responsible for destroying bee hives, hedgehogs and ground-nesting birds such as skylarks, grey partridges, and meadow pipits. It is also responsible for the loss of wood warblers, nightingales and stone curlews. Those are facts. The badger is a danger, and like all wild animals that have no natural predator—just like deer and foxes—it should be culled, so that numbers are maintained’
However, when asked to provide a source of the claimed facts, Drax declined to respond and left it to his colleague Geoffrey Clifton-Brown who said ‘Well, the source is evident to any countryman out there (so they are not facts – they are anecdotal observations)There has been a rapid decline in hedgehogs, (True, partly due to agricultural pesticide usage and the removal of hedgerows from farmers fields) and we know perfectly well that badgers eat hedgehogs’ young, wild birds and birds’ nests those final comments causing Cardiff South MP Stephen Doughty to ‘Yo-Yo’ up and down asking for Clifton-Brown to give way.
Geoffrey Clifton-Brown went on to complete a line by line account of government policy including congratulating the Minister, George Eustace who was present in the front row.
Angela Smith joined the debate “ I would like to congratulate the lead petitioner, Simon King, who has not been mentioned so far and who managed to amass the 100,000 signatures needed to secure the debate. That we managed to get over the 100,000 threshold demonstrates the degree of interest in this topic outside the House. I also think that if we are to find a way forward on this issue, it is important in the long term to find consensus and common ground. I applaud those charities, including the Wildlife Trusts and the Save Me Trust, that have tried very hard—and are in many instances succeeding—to establish working relationships with farmers, so that we can start to find a way forward that brings all parties to the table, and so that we have constructive attitudes and dialogue instead of the rather divisive debate that has characterised all the discussions on badger culling so far, she continued to set out her opposition to the government policy, before concluding;
In summary, as time has gone on we have witnessed a blatant refusal by Government to follow the science. They have not only pursued this policy in opposition to the outcomes of the RBCT; they have gradually but significantly moved further and further away from the original scientific parameters established in April 2011. They have moved so far, in fact, that at this stage it is probably now impossible, in relation to the extended culling areas, to determine whether the approach is effective at all. They have moved so far away from the original parameters that culling, as practised in the last four years, has therefore been discredited. It has no basis in science because the science has been distorted, twisted and, in the end, utterly abandoned.
In conclusion, we need to see a thorough, independent assessment of the pilot culls. The Government should be making international comparisons with countries that have focused on vaccination as an alternative, where vaccination is used, as it is with other species, to establish a critical mass of immunity. That is the key point about vaccination. It is not about individuals necessarily; it is also about critical mass and ensuring immunity at a level that gives a country a sense of moving forward and eradicating diseases such as TB. Finally, and above everything, we need the Government to commit to abandoning culling if an independent evaluation of the pilot areas demonstrates a failure to deliver a meaningful, long-term reduction in the incidence of bovine TB.
Sue Hayman, Shadow Environment Minister replied for the opposition; As we have heard today, bovine TB has a significant impact on farmers by causing loss of livestock, particularly for small dairy farmers, who are already under significant financial pressure on a daily basis. The compensation they receive for slaughtered cattle is not good—up to a maximum of £1,225 for non-pedigree dairy cows and less for beef cows. Quite simply, bovine TB must be urgently controlled and eradicated. However, I want to be absolutely clear: the Labour party opposes badger culling because we do not believe that it is the most effective way of managing the disease or that is it the most humane.
We welcome the Government’s commitment to pursuing other measures, including tighter cattle controls, biosecurity, and the design of the new badger edge vaccination scheme. However, it is disappointing that the Government propose licensing a supplementary form of badger control only after a cull has been completed over at least four years.
Clearly, it is time for long-term solutions to combat bovine TB. We would like to see an alternative, science-led approach, combining a number of methods, to prioritise the development of a vaccine, together with improved cattle testing and cattle management, with tighter biosecurity measures and improved animal husbandry. Evidence based and science-led policy must be at the heart of everything we do.
George Eustace Minister of Sate for the Department of the Environment responded to the debate;bMany Members talked about the importance of cattle movement controls, and I completely agree with that. In fact, it is not in doubt; we have a consensus on that. Cattle movement controls are absolutely at the heart of the Government’s strategy and have been for many years. I simply ask Members to look at the controls we have now.
Last year we consulted on, and have now implemented, a new approach to using the interferon gamma test much more often than before. When the skin test and the surveillance test detect a problem, we are deploying the interferon-gamma test. (This is only after a minimum of two years of culling have taken place – not mentioned by the Minister) We have also just implemented an approach of taking a much harsher interpretation of some of the inconclusive tests, as some of the evidence is that an inconclusive test often means a delayed response.
A number of Members raised the issue of vaccination. As I said earlier, we believe that vaccination of badgers could give us an exit strategy from the cull once we have reduced numbers. That is why we continue to spend millions of pounds trying to develop an oral vaccine for badgers, and that work is ongoing.
In 2015, we had an edge area vaccination pilot, where six voluntary groups came together to support us in rolling out the trapping and vaccination of badgers in the edge area. As a result of the shortage of vaccine and a request from the World Health Organisation that the vaccine we had be reserved for medical use in humans only, we had to suspend that programme, in common with Wales. We hope to secure new supplies of vaccine and to resume that edge area vaccination project in 2018.
Commenting on the failure to test any dead badgers from the culls for TB George Eustace said “The issue was looked at extensively during the randomised badger culling trials, and we know that in the high-risk area, where there is a strong prevalence of the disease, around a third of badgers have bovine TB. That has been demonstrated previously” (The Minister, disingenuously uses the RBCT data only when it suits him. The truth is that the culls criteria are so far removed from the RBCT trial conditions that it makes no sense to assume the same outcome)
George Eustace continued; “On the science, there is no example anywhere in the world of a country that has eradicated TB without also addressing the reservoir of the disease in the wildlife population (Wales, would be a great place to look, Minister. The full benefits of that RBCT trial presented themselves in the years after the report was concluded, the average reduction in incidence, even if we take account of the theory of perturbation, was 16% during the trial, but in the 18 months after culling ended in the RBCT, there was a very sharp, 54% reduction in the incidence of the disease.The average across the period was 28.3%, so the evidence was pretty clear that removing and reducing the badger population in a proactive way could contribute meaningfully to this issue. (The Minister has used a clever play on words here to reverse the common statement that culling badgers can have no meaningful effect on Bovine TB in cattle – that is the actual conclusion and again the Minister quotes the science of the RBCT but has not met any of the criteria so the two are not comparable).
George Eustace continued “There are issues that we continue to look at. (It is clear, then the minister considers that culling will continue, but claims) I have an open mind to additional approaches that can help us bear down on the disease, such as the importance of biosecurity. The handling of farmyard manure has been mentioned; “We know that the disease bacterium can spread through farmyard manure and through latrines via badgers. That is recognised and not disputed. We already have many restrictions in place on when farmyard manure from infected herds can be spread and where it can be spread. I constantly keep such issues under review. There is also some novel research going on, very much in the early stages, into whether we could develop a self-disseminating vaccine for badgers. That would mean using something like a herpes virus. The vaccine would be inserted and would spread naturally through a badger population. If we could perfect something like that, it would be a major breakthrough, although we are some way off.
I want to move on and cover some of the other points that were raised. Paul Flynn raised the issue of the Kimblewick hunt and dogs. Our veterinary advice is clear that dogs are not a major contributor to the spread of the disease. The incidence of TB in dogs is very rare. We occasionally get incidents, as we do with cats. Three years ago we had an outbreak of TB in cats in a particular area, but the veterinary advice is clear: it is not a key contributor. In the case of the Kimblewick hunt, an epidemiological investigation is under way. Until it is completed, it would be wrong to speculate on what the origin or route of the disease was. On Paul Flynn’s suggestion of stopping hunting, although I understand that he has a wider objective to do that, it would not be a proportionate step, based on the risk that we have.
To pick up on the point made by Geoffrey Clifton-Brown on the culls that have completed their four years, as I explained at the end of last year we consulted on having low-level maintenance culling to keep the population in check. That would very much be a small operation with much-reduced numbers—not like the culls we had for the first four years. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown also mentioned deer and other species, and he is right that wild deer can carry TB, but our veterinary advice is that their role in transmitting TB is significantly lower than that of badgers, because of their nature and how they move about. TB spreads less freely among deer because badgers live underground in close proximity to one another. Nevertheless, deer are a potential concern, but we believe badgers to be far more prevalent in spreading the disease, and do so in far greater numbers, in particular in the South west, the high-risk area, so that is where we are focusing our attention at the moment.
One of the challenges of TB is that it is a bacterial disease, and it is notoriously hard to get vaccines to work in that context, whereas with a virus, if the vaccine is cracked, the virus is cracked—as with, for example, the Schmallenberg vaccine. We have to recognise that despite decades of medical research, the best TB vaccine available is still the BCG. I go back to what I said at the beginning: vaccination is only one of our tools for bearing down on the disease. I am afraid, however, that a badger cull is an essential part of any coherent strategy to eradicate TB. That is why we are continuing with the policy.
As the leader of the debate, Paul Flynn summarises the outcomes; He said; “The reply that we have had from the Minister is very disappointing. He has said that he will not take any action on hounds because it is very rare for bovine TB in dogs or hounds to be transferred to other species.
The Government cannot have it both ways, the Chief Veterinary Officer, Nigel Gibbens took to the airwaves in 2013 to proclaim that it was not safe to take one’s pet Labrador, or let one’s pet cat, out into the woods, as it might catch bovine TB from badgers and subsequently infect its owner. I think that was taken as a rather extreme view at the time, but if the veterinary view is that bovine TB is infectious to other species from hounds, we must take very seriously what is happening in a hunt that has been trampling over six of our counties
Some other points made in this debate were entirely false. The figures about Wales that one Government Member gave were just untrue. We know that the system in Wales is working, but the system in England is not. Between November 2015 and 2016, there were 36 new herd incidents in which official TB-free status was withdrawn—we are going backward with those—and the number of cattle destroyed was up 8% in some areas.
We know, too, that the number of herds that are identified as infected with bovine TB at slaughterhouses is in the hundreds. The crude, unscientific system that we have for detecting TB is not working. The Minister gave some ‘pie in the sky’ hope for the future about things that are unlikely to come to fruition for many years, but the Government has shown a lack of conviction in this policy by setting a 25-year target for its delivery.
I accused the Government of crowd-pleasing. I was talking about the farming crowd, not the general crowd. The Government has outraged the majority of the public. It is not reasonable to mock those who sacrifice their time and safety to protest vigorously against unnecessary acts of cruelty that have no basis in science or what happens throughout the rest of the world. The worst mistake that politicians make is to say, “Something must be done. We can’t think of anything intelligent to do, we can’t think of any practical to do that will work, but we must do something.” I am afraid it is one of the great sins of this House and the way that we legislate that the worst mistakes we make are often in the pursuit of “something must be done”. Badger culling is a very bad idea. It is cruel, and the country will rightly show its contempt for a Government who continue with it.