Badger Culling/Bovine TB

Debate between Rupa Huq and Paul Monaghan

Wednesday 7th September 2016 Westminster Hall

[Dr Monaghan]

The hon. Gentleman flags up an important point, which again I will come to. We agree that this is a crisis that must be dealt with now. It affects mainly English cattle farmers, and their families and their communities, and the impact cannot be overstated. If the disease continues to increase unchecked in England, it will begin to threaten herds in other nations that are currently free of the disease, such as Scotland. I want to avoid that happening.

Inexplicably, some people hypothesise that the rising incidence of bovine TB in England is attributable to badgers. I say “inexplicably” because research shows that even in remote areas of England where bovine TB is rampant, 86% of badgers are clear of the disease, with just 1.6% of the badger population considered capable of transmitting it. The role of badgers in the transmission of bovine TB to cattle is controversial.

Badger culling was conducted under a number of schemes throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. These included at different times the use of snaring, gassing, cage-trapping and shooting. Many thousands of badgers were killed prior to the introduction of the Protection of Badgers Act 1992. However, no effort was made to evaluate empirically the effectiveness of badger culls relative to reducing bovine TB incidence in cattle until the Natural Environment Research Council initiated the randomised badger culling trial in 1998.

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman talked about evidence. Does he agree with Professor Rosie Woodroffe of London University, who says that the mismatch between killing badgers and the spread of bovine TB is

“a huge disappointment for evidence-based policy making”?

[Dr Monaghan]

It is indeed a huge disappointment. I spoke to the professor on that very point just the other day.

The field trial I mentioned ran for seven years to 2005 and was overseen by the Independent Scientific Group on Cattle TB under the chairmanship of Professor John Bourne. The study found that reactive badger culling resulted in a significant increase in cattle TB to the extent that reactive culling was abandoned early in the trial. Proactive culling of badgers resulted in an average reduction of TB in cattle of approximately 23% in proactive culling zones compared with control areas, but an increase of approximately 24.5% on neighbouring land not subject to culling, which was thought to be due to the perturbing impact of culling.

The Independent Scientific Group on Cattle TB concluded: badger culling can make no meaningful contribution to the future control of TB in cattle; deficiencies in cattle testing regimes mean that cattle themselves contribute significantly to the persistence and spread of disease in areas where TB occurs—that is, cattle are the disease reservoir; cattle-to-cattle transmission is the main cause of disease spread to new geographic areas; substantial reductions in cattle TB incidence could be achieved by improving cattle-based control measures; and it was unfortunate that agricultural and veterinary leaders continued to believe, despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, that the main approach to cattle TB control must involve some form of badger population control. No substantial or respectable body of scientific work has ever been produced to contradict the conclusions of the Independent Scientific Group on Cattle TB.

In short, scientific evidence does not identify a causal relationship between the presence of badgers and a rising incidence of bovine TB in cattle, nor do scientific data suggest that culling badgers reduces the prevalence of the disease in beef and dairy herds.