I've been a journalist for 35 years and I don't think a single year has gone by in which I have not reported something about farmers blaming badgers for TB in cattle. Government ministers have come and gone, and I have to say it's not too cynical to suggest that mostly they have have been motivated simply by the interest-groups that supported them rather than a genuine desire to find a long-term solution.
We appear to be in a cycle in which, variously, scientists alternate with landowners for control of the debate. On the one hand we have a small clutch of objective facts and on the other there is an article of faith which says farmers know best.
My first encounter with the badger/TB issue was in the 1970s and something called the Thornbury Report; then there was the Dunnet Report and most recently the Krebs Report: no doubt several other emminent scientists in between, before and possibly more to come. Once upon a time it was received wisdom that only by gassing badgers underground could bovine TB be eradicated. And yet bovine TB continued.
Scientific knowledge took a significant, if controversial, step forward with Krebs and the randomised badger culling trial. It trapped and shot 11,000 badgers in a bid to establish a link to TB in cattle. It found that although about 20% of the badgers were infected with TB (ie more than 8,000 healthy badgers were shot) there was no clear transmission route to cows. Scientists are clear that other wild mammals, and even some domestic pets, can also carry TB. No-one disputes that cows carry TB and transmit it very easily to each other.
I forecast that today's public consultation exercise will tell us nothing that we do not already know. It is a massive waste of time and money.
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