The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) has welcomed the UK Government’s announcement that it will bring an end to culling badgers to control bovine tuberculosis (bTB), instead driving down rates through vaccination. But the charity is calling for them to bring an end to the badger cull far earlier than 2029
RSPCA chief executive Chris Sherwood said: “This announcement is really welcome and marks a watershed moment in the fight against bovine tuberculosis. We are concerned however, that badgers will still face up to another five years of being needlessly killed in the name of bTB eradication.
“Bovine tuberculosis is an issue which is devastating to farming communities. For many years, we have been pressing for a more science-led approach to solve this terrible disease. 230,000 badgers have been pointlessly killed in the cull since 2013, despite government data which found no evidence that culling badgers has had an effect on eliminating tuberculosis in cattle.
“While we are fully behind these new measures such as carrying out a badger population survey, analysing badger tuberculosis rates and putting more money into cattle and badger vaccinations, we are calling for an immediate halt to new culls and a reduction in badgers allowed to be killed in any of the licensed culls. We fear that the population survey of badgers announced today will show depleted numbers of a protected species so we can’t wait another five years for that to happen.
“Science has already shown us that a major contributing factor to the spread of this disease is it passing from cow to cow, so solutions are also needed to focus much more on cattle and include more frequent and improved cattle testing, an improved test to identify infected cattle, better management of cattle movements, cattle vaccination and incentives to improve biosecurity in herds.
“Hopefully [the] announcement is a new dawn in the fight against bovine tuberculosis and we look forward to contributing to this aim.”
