Killing Badgers

If you want to irritate me then by all means tell me that something as offensively idiotic as a badger cull is taking place. From today, 1st June 2013, farmers are free to shoot badgers in two trial areas. I am tempted to suggest that badgers should, in response, henceforth be allowed to shoot farmers. We could pay mercenaries to dress up in badger costumes and besiege farmhouses across the country with medium to heavy artillery. Whilst this all sounds rather enjoyable, the reality is a thing of sterility and gross disrespect for the land which supports us. Thousands of badgers will be killed as a rather twisted experiment. The aim of this is to reduce the spread of bovine TB, which badgers can carry.

Here is a rather good link to a BBC Q&A on the cull: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22614350

The article mentions that badgers are a protected species, and indeed they are. The following is taken from http://www.rspca.org.uk/allaboutanimals/wildlife/laws/badgers :

'Under the Protection of Badgers Act 1992, in England and Wales (the law has been amended in Scotland) it is against the law to:
-Wilfully kill, injure or take a badger.
-Cruelly mistreat a badger.
-Dig for a badger.
-Intentionally or recklessly damage or destroy a badger sett – or obstruct access to it.
-Cause a dog to enter a badger sett.
-Disturb a badger when it is occupying a sett.'

So what is effectively being proposed is that it's illegal to kill one badger but fine to kill tens of thousands. This is simply stupidity. If memory serves, it is also illegal to kill humans in this country, and we should not treat the neglect of this law as more abhorrent than neglect of the protected status of badgers, simply because it might mean that we ourselves become imperilled in the first case but not in the second. This is pure selfishness. The government is, implicitly, saying that some laws are more binding than others. The following statement could be made in Parliament and would present no inconsistency with what is being proposed: 'We feel it is so important to protect badgers that we have enshrined it in law. And by the way, we are going to kill thousands of them from June 1st.' Regardless of your opinion on the ethics of it, the inconsistency is clear. I await the day when we are told children are to be culled for spreading head lice, or the homeless are to be culled for worsening the appearance of our streets, or that anyone with bird flu is to be immediately killed to reduce contamination. This is all as nonsensical and unjustifiable as killing badgers because a minority may spread a disease. 

Something else that really irks me about this is that it's so driven by commerce, but commerce should have no place in the state of our natural surroundings. Badgers have no monetary value to anybody and so there's nobody to defend them. This is why protesting and making a general fuss is so important. Economics largely delivers the most socially accepted state of affairs, but this is not true in cases such as this. We attribute more of a non-monetary value to the presence of badgers in the country - they are a part of the wildlife and are a necessary part of the food chain too. We gain a sense of enjoyment when we see them on the television going about their badgery existences. But farmers don't care about this. The monetary value of badgers is as much as we would pay to keep them, but this does not involve farmers. The badgers would certainly not be killed if they produced some saleable product but, as they don't, no farmer has an interest in saving them. Similar parallels can be drawn with the situation in Africa with poaching (of animals, not eggs) - locals have no interest in defending many species, but reward people for preserving wildlife and poaching falls very quickly. This is a sad fact but one which must be acknowledged. I think it is unfair to approach the eradication of so many animals with such levity merely because they have no monetary value. In fact, this is precisely why the government should be against this policy - it is the only party that can resist the markets' need to pursue profits at all costs. The point of the government is to make sure things like this don't happen - to keep the private sector in check. Otherwise they have no purpose. Such gross dereliction of duty is one thing that really angers me.

The aforementioned BBC article goes on to discuss scientific evidence relating to this cull, writing that

'Scientific evidence suggests sustained culls of badgers under controlled conditions could reduce TB in local cattle by 12-16% after four years of annual culls, and five years of follow-up, although it could be lower and it could be higher.'

Personally I do not believe even great success could justify the extirpation of a huge number of badgers, but as a cost-benefit analysis, the following may be incisive. These culls are aiming to destroy at least 70% of the badger population in each zone, and for that, at a cost of millions, and 9 years of timewasting, they can expect a 12-16% fall in bovine TB in each area! How is this even slightly appealing?

More damning still are the other findings mentioned in the article:

'The randomised badger culling trial in England found that killing badgers disrupted their social groups, with surviving animals moving out to establish new groups, taking TB with them. This perturbation effect led to an increase in cases of bovine TB outside of the cull zone, although the impact diminished over time.'

Now this is where I get really pissed off. Not only does the government take the killing of thousands of badgers so lightly, it  does so with no solid scientific evidence. I could at least understand the reasoning behind a cull if there was clear evidence to suggest that it will help to eliminate TB in cattle, but this is not at all upheld by science. In this 'randomised trial' reactive culling, i.e. culling in response to an outbreak, had to be 'suspended early after [a] significant rise in infection.' So we may spend millions of pounds, and waste a lot of time, only to find that we've gained a gargantuan pile of badger corpses and a bigger bovine TB problem. To undertake mass slaughter on such spurious scientific grounds is doubly loathsome. This money should be spent on developing a vaccine instead, not on recourse to medieval solutions (which give the appearance of action whilst actually making the problem worse).

What does this cull say of our regard for our wildlife? We have no compunction towards the idea of killing thousands of defenceless creatures for modest to no gains. Indeed, the effect may be negative (although in my opinion, overall the effect will be negative regardless of the effect on local bovine TB levels). What price scientific inquiry? What price our responsibilities as the only reasoning creature? What price the law if the government can break it on a whim? I detest this policy.

I happen to think that these 'e-petition' things are a token gesture to a powerless populace, but nevertheless I signed the petition at http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/38257

Also have a look at http://teambadger.org/ for more information.