Kill the cull?

BY AUTUMN 2022, IT WILL be nine years since the then government initiated the first two pilot badger culls in Gloucestershire and Somerset.

Since then, culling has expanded to cover nearly 37,000km² of the south-west and west of England, and (not including figures from 2021) taken the lives of some 143,000 badgers at a cost to the public purse of £47 million.

If it carries on as planned, some campaigners opposed to culling have estimated that 280,000 badgers will be killed, perhaps three-quarters of the entire UK population.

And the result of this wholescale, licensed killing of a protected species? According to a new study, there has been no significant decrease in levels of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in cattle that can be attributed to culling, the sole reason for embarking on this drastic course of action in the first place.

You might expect that new, peer-reviewed science, even in an area as controversial as badger culling, might help to draw the two sides of the debate together. While all