Badger Culling

Margaret Ferrier Excerpts

Monday 27th March 2017 Westminster Hall

[Dr Paul Monaghan (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (SNP)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) on opening this debate with an excellent speech. We last debated badger culling on 7 September 2016, in a debate that I led in this Chamber. Today, we are debating e-petition 165672, which calls for an end to badger culling, rather than an extension of culls to new areas.

Ending the badger culls is an eminently sensible and empirically sound proposition supported by almost 110,000 members of the public. I welcome the public support for the issue, and Mr King’s leading role in initiating the petition. The e-petition notes that experts in both disease control and animal welfare agree that badger culls have proven to be ineffective and inhumane. I add that the culls are also ruinously expensive, wasting taxpayer money at the rate of more than £6,000 per badger inhumanely slaughtered.

In September, I noted that bovine tuberculosis, or BTB, affects beef and dairy cattle herds in England, and that although Scotland has been officially free from the disease since 2009 and Wales is increasingly demonstrating how to bring it under control, the incidence of infection in England is rising, particularly along the edge areas, which threatens further herd outbreaks and the perpetuation of absolute misery for England’s farmers.

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (SNP)]

I join my hon. Friend in commending the work done in Scotland to ensure that we have been certified free of the disease for the last eight years. Does he share my concerns about the repercussions for TB control, particularly among cattle, of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU?

[Dr Monaghan]

I absolutely agree, particularly in relation to the evident risks of the spread of infection if appropriate cattle movement control and biosecurity measures are not implemented. That is why the Scottish National party is participating in this debate, even though it relates primarily to England and to the impact of bovine TB on England’s farmers.

We should be in no doubt that bovine TB is a very serious problem, and that killing badgers on an industrial scale is probably making the situation worse. Badger culling is nothing less than a costly distraction from the implementation of an effective solution, which requires a focus on sound animal husbandry and biosecurity, including vaccination, increased cattle movement control measures, and improved infection testing.

We know that bovine tuberculosis is caused by mycobacterium bovis, which is excreted by infected cattle on to the land they graze, where it survives in the soil and is then passed to other cattle and other species. Nevertheless, the predominant mode of transmission in cattle is nose-to-nose, and such transmission is encouraged by trading and moving cattle between herds. Indeed, evidence suggests that the number of new herd breakdowns appears to double approximately every nine years.

In the last decade alone, the UK Government have slaughtered 314,000 otherwise healthy cattle in an attempt to control infection. In 2013, more than 6 million bovine TB tests were performed in England in an ineffective attempt to identify the disease, leading to the slaughter of more than 26,000 cattle. Such skin tests are only 20% to 50% effective. The Minister will be interested to know that a new study, published just last week, shows that, as I argued in September, the tuberculin skin test fails to identify up to 50% of reactive cases. The skin test has always been a herd test, not an individual test. Its efficacy is hindered by the ability of the disease to hide in animals whose immune response is suppressed. In cattle, this could be due to a range of factors, including age, history of exposure, pregnancy and fluke parasite burden.

The ineffectiveness of the test means that in the last decade, the rising incidence of the disease has cost the UK taxpayer more than £500 million. Today, 20% of all new herd breakdowns are detected only in the slaughterhouse, such is the ineffectiveness of the overall testing programme. The inability to bring the disease under control resulted in a cost to the UK taxpayer of almost £100 million in 2014 alone, and the additional cost to farmers is estimated to run into tens of millions of pounds annually. The financial costs are staggering. The rise in the incidence of the disease in England is giving rise not only to an increase in the number of beef and dairy herds affected, but to increased geographical spread and consequently a spiralling cost to the UK taxpayer—more than £1 billion in the next decade alone, by the estimate of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

The crisis that England’s cattle farmers, and their families and communities, face cannot be overstated. If the disease continues to increase unchecked in England, it will also begin to threaten herds in other nations that are currently free of the disease, such as Scotland, and that are successfully combating it, such as Wales. I am certain that we all want to avoid that. In that context, it is frankly inexplicable that the rising incidence of bovine tuberculosis in England is being attributed to badgers, because research shows that, even in remote areas of England where bovine TB is rampant, 86% of badgers are clear of it.

The Government must stop allowing farmers to believe that the level of infectious TB in badgers is much higher than it is, and that culling might make a difference when we know that it will not. Despite the huge amounts being spent, no substantial or respectable body of scientific work has ever been produced that contradicts the conclusions of the study by the independent scientific group on cattle TB, which initiated the randomised badger culling trial in 1998. That study, as we have heard, found that reactive badger culling resulted in significant increases in cattle TB incidence, to the extent that culling was abandoned early in the trial. The study concluded, first, that

“badger culling cannot meaningfully contribute to the future control of cattle TB”;

secondly, that

“weaknesses in cattle testing regimes mean that cattle themselves contribute significantly to the persistence and spread of disease in all areas where TB occurs”—

that is, cattle themselves are the disease reservoir; thirdly, that

“cattle-to-cattle transmission…is the main cause of disease spread to new areas”;

fourthly, that

“substantial reductions in cattle TB incidence could be achieved by improving cattle-based control measures”;

and, finally, that

“agricultural and veterinary leaders continue to believe, in spite of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, that the main approach to cattle TB control must involve some form of badger population control.”

In short, the scientific evidence does not identify a causal relationship between the presence of badgers and a rising incidence of bovine tuberculosis in cattle. The current approach means that the people of England can have as much bovine tuberculosis as the UK Government are prepared to pay for.

History shows us that bovine tuberculosis is an ugly opponent, and that dealing with it requires scientific precision in testing, movement controls and selective removal. In the 1960s, bovine tuberculosis infection was reduced by around 80% in under four years. That reduction involved short-term actions in return for long-term benefit. The intelligent and evidence-led approach is to deploy interferon gamma and apply the emerging late-stage tests for hidden bovine tuberculosis, such as RPA 7, alongside biosecurity measures and cattle movement restrictions. Resources must be directed towards testing and control, and plans for expensive and divisive badger-culling pilots in England must be put on hold. There is already more than enough evidence to show that the controversial free-shooting method does not work. The strategy must now be to seek to deploy gamma testing in the pilot areas, and plans should be initiated to invest heavily in supporting livestock controls, with unequivocal backing from the UK Government.

Further attempts to disguise the failure of the badger cull programme are futile. Compelling recent evidence from Wales and Ireland shows that there is no value in addressing the hypothetical contribution from badger culling, especially while the overwhelmingly critical cattle-to-cattle transfer remains uncontrolled. No other country is seriously considering such a pitifully crude, wasteful and ineffective solution to bovine tuberculosis as badger culling.

In September’s debate, the Minister noted the policies that he is overseeing:

“We have annual testing in the high-risk area and four-yearly testing in the low-risk area. We have annual testing in the edge area and six-monthly testing in hotspots in the edge area, and we continue to consider rolling that out. We have contiguous testing in the high-risk area where there is a breakdown, and we have radial testing in the low-risk area, going out to 3 km, where we have a breakdown. We are now consulting on greater use of the gamma interferon test so that we can pick up the disease faster. We are also looking at what more can be done in other species. We are constantly trying to refine and improve our cattle movement controls”.—[Official Report, 7 September 2016; Vol. 614, c. 219WH.]

There is scope for further work on those points. What progress has the Minister made on controlling slurry spreading, on managing deer populations, on limiting hunting with hounds, on restricting cattle movements and, above all, on challenging weak biosecurity measures, including feeding infected cattle to hounds? I say “weak”, because it has recently been brought to my attention that Natural England has rolled back on farmers’ risk assessments; indeed, I understand that in five of the seven new cull areas, only 5% of participants’ farms had received biosecurity visits from Natural England by mid-September 2016. It is unsurprising, then, that Natural England failed to release information from its biosecurity monitoring forms for all the new cull areas and has abandoned the assessment ratings of good, fair and poor that were used up to 2014. Why is that, Minister?

By 2015, the percentage of participants’ farms with cattle that had not—I emphasise not—been visited by Natural England monitoring staff was 55% in west Gloucestershire, 63% in west Somerset, and 68% in Dorset. I repeat that those are the percentages of participants’ farms that were not visited. That is not science-led or evidence-led practice, Minister. Why was a small team of between just seven and 10 people monitoring biosecurity visits from 2012 to 2015? Has the team been expanded to an appropriate level? I also note that the UK Government no longer collect data on the humaneness of culling badgers. Again, why, Minister?

There is also further evidence of a failure to assess the wider ecological impacts of culling. A report by the Food and Environment Research Agency in 2011 identified a range of outcomes from the culling of badgers that could result in disruption to ecosystems. The report identified the potential impact of the resulting change in the abundance of other species on a wide range of habitats, and it indicated that screening exercises and appropriate assessments should be carried out where badger culling was proposed. However, with a total of 10 licences having been issued to date, the UK Government have failed to conduct appropriate assessments to determine whether badger culling is creating wider ecological impacts that affect species and habitats protected under the Bern convention. That is yet another reason why badger culling should be suspended.

The historical and contemporary evidence increasingly demonstrates that the true engine driving the ongoing spread of bovine TB is, and always has been, the so-called problem herds with recurrent and/or persistent chronic TB. The proposition that the inhumane persecution of badgers will miraculously control TB infections is ridiculous, which is exactly why the Welsh Government have abandoned badger culling and why the European Union has never agreed with the UK’s policy in this area. This is a disease more likely to be carried on the boots of human beings than by badgers.

The UK Government should abandon the tuberculosis skin test as the primary means of identifying infection and new herd outbreaks, and should instead adopt modern methods and technologies to address this disease. Specifically, they should adopt gamma interferon tests and robust systems of biosecurity. Combined with a co-ordinated badger vaccination policy in high-risk areas for bovine TB in England, and restricted movement of cattle, this course of action would represent a more progressive and intelligent approach, and it would realise results within months. It would also be more humane and better support England’s farmers.

Just as I did in September, I again ask the Minister to please look to Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales; to recognise the important contribution of rigorous blood testing regimes and effective movement controls to reduce the risks of cattle-to-cattle transmission; to introduce a centrally co-ordinated and comprehensive badger vaccination policy in high-risk infection areas in England, focusing on reducing the incidence of this dreadful disease in cattle; and to please stop the regressive and medieval practice of badger culling, which the public abhor, and which diminishes our collective humanity.