New paper undermines Government’s rationale for badger culling
Analysis highlights flaws in the Randomised Badger Culling Trial, which forms the basis of the policy to shoot British badgers.
The Government’s rationale for the controversial badger culling policy as part of its efforts to control the spread of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in cattle, which since 2013 has resulted in around a quarter of a million badgers being killed under licence, is under renewed scrutiny. The publication today of new analyses undermines the results of the Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT) on which successive governments have relied in their attempts to justify the policy.
The RBCT was a huge logistical scientific field trial, conducted between 1998-2005, that aimed to establish whether killing badgers would help reduce TB in cattle. Cattle TB rates in areas in which badgers were shot were compared with those where no badgers were targeted.
The results, which were analysed by statisticians and published in the journal Nature in 2006, appeared to show a positive effect on cattle TB from proactive badger culling inside cull areas, albeit the independent scientific group that ran the trial concluded that badger culling could make ‘no meaningful contribution’ to the control of bovine TB in cattle. Nevertheless, in 2010 the government decided to go ahead with its badger culling policy on the basis of the marginal effect of proactive culling on cattle TB that the trial had apparently demonstrated.
However, a new paper, published today by the Royal Society in its journal Open Science, has highlighted the flaws in the original analysis of the RBCT’s results. Led by Professor Paul Torgerson, Professor of Veterinary Epidemiology at the University of Zürich, who also published an extensive re-analysis of the RBCT’s results last year, the new paper questions articles published in the scientific literature since the RBCT that relied on its findings to claim that badger interventions are a necessary part of bovine TB control policy. It also explains why independent studies conducted since culling began have failed to show with any certainty any significant impact on cattle TB in areas where badgers have been killed.
Reacting to the news, Born Free’s head of Policy veterinarian Dr Mark Jones said:
“At Born Free we have always maintained that killing badgers is unscientific and unnecessary, as well as being ineffective and inhumane. This important new paper corroborates our long-held view. We call on the government to take the new findings on board, to accept that the ‘evidence’ on which culling was based was flawed from the very beginning, and to finally bring the state-sponsored killing of badgers to an immediate and permanent end. It’s high time the various scientists got together to find a way forward that will benefit farmers and their cattle, while avoiding the devastation and costs to the public purse associated with the mass slaughter of our wildlife, and advise government accordingly.”
Find out more about Born Free’s efforts to protect badgers: