TB-hit farmers trade on emotion. We deal in fact, says Badger Trust

Ask any farmer affected by bovine TB (bTB) what they think of the Badger Trust and it is a fair bet their response will reveal a mixture of disdain, distrust and anger.

Many farmers hold the charity, an affiliation of 60 local badger groups with about 1,500 fee- paying supporters, partially responsible for putting the cattle industry in the dire predicament it finds itself in today. They accuse it of peddling a distorted version of the truth about badgers and bTB to the media and politicians which has contributed to the air of uncertainty over the issue.

But as I found out when I met Jack Reedy, its vice-chairman and its new public face, on a sunny morning in Stratford-upon-Avon, the Badger Trust sees the situation very differently.
It is, in its eyes, the gatekeeper of the truth on the subject, basing its arguments solely on reason and sound science. Its role is to counter the ‘scaremongering nonsense’ and ‘anti-badger propaganda’ spouted by ‘dangerously emotional’ farmers.

“I don’t see myself as being part of a campaigning group. We are advocates for wider attention to the complexities of this issue. We try to persuade people away from one shot solutions and overstating the case,” says Mr Reedy.

It is not as if Mr Reedy, a member of the Warwickshire badger group for two decades, is unfamiliar with farming.

Debate frustration

We meet in a pub close to where Mr Reedy, a former editor of the Birmingham Post who has also worked for The Guardian and Sunday Times, works two days a week for the Stratford Herald. He is the paper’s farming correspondent.

But he expresses frustration over a debate which should be pursuing a common goal of healthy cattle and healthy badgers has become an ‘adversarial political argument - rather than a co-ordinated scientific argument’.

He is surprised at the suggestion the Badger Trust could be partly to blame for that. “Really? How?” he asks.

My suggestion that the trust has put its head in the sand over the realities of bTB spread, prompts the first of many attacks on how farmers are presenting their arguments.

“It has got to the point where the public is being given the impression, absolutely wrongly, that every badger in the country is capable of giving TB to the public.

“That’s not down to anybody except the farming industry and it is deeply irresponsible of them to talk about badgers being riddled with TB because we know they are not, even in hotspot areas.”

He cites examples of how ‘farmers are trading on emotion rather than scientific fact’ - including a teenager being ‘paraded’ in front of the media to blame badgers for passing the disease to her ‘pet cow’.

“How the hell did she know that without anything to back it up at all? That has got nothing to do with science and is just wasted airtime,” he says.

Why, he asks rhetorically, do problems like mastitis and foot rot - which affect more cattle - not generate the same emotional response? “The difference is TB is an economic disaster and the others are not,” he says.

So what, according to the Trust, is the role of badgers in the nation’s bTB problem?

Mr Reedy concedes some badgers ‘have TB’ and there is ‘evidence they are implicated in the spread of bTB in hotspot areas’. “I would be an idiot to deny that,” he says. “But the great burden of responsibility for that spread is in the cattle and it is in cattle measures where the solution will be found - as the ISG (the Independent Scientific Group on bTB) said.”

But even the ISG, whose 2007 report put paid to farmer hopes of an imminent badger cull, conceded badgers ‘contribute significantly to the disease in cattle’.

How else, I ask, can you explain the persistence of bTB in hotspot areas, initially west Cornwall and Gloucestershire, after extensive cattle measures had reduced disease levels to virtually zero in most parts of the country by the 1960s?

Mr Reedy says this was due to the reluctance of the Government to ‘completely cull out herds where there were clearly very deep levels of infection which persisted’ in those areas. He suggests an explanation as to why whole herd slaughter was needed in the South West but was not in the North West. “That might have been down to things like climate differences where the warmer weather might account for the rather solid persistence (in the South West),” he says.

Scientific evidence

Afterwards, I regret not pushing him on the scientific evidence which underpinned this suggestion.

He cites the continuing trend towards larger herd sizes and the failure of infected pregnant cattle to show up positive in skin tests due to suppressed immunity as among the drivers for cattle-to cattle spread.

He highlights BSE and foot-and-mouth - which diverted veterinary attention - as drivers of the hike in incidence since the mid-1990s.

He refuses to accept the evidence of affected farmers, who say their ‘closed herds’ can only have been infected by badgers. “What is a closed herd? There was one fellow in the west country who was claiming he had a closed herd, but was travelling to shows right across the area. What about the lorries and the feed trucks, as well?”

He insists any measures deployed to tackle bTB must recognise the ‘comparatively small’ effect of the badger compared with the ‘massive effect of cattle’.

He identifies a return to ‘zoning’ - the effective banning of cattle movements from high risk areas to lower risk areas - and whole herd removal, as the sort of measures needed in future, alongside badger and cattle vaccination.

Mr Reedy frequently returns to the ISG’s final report as the definitive evidence base on the topic. This shows culling does not work, he adds. “If you start reducing the numbers, you risk interchange and the boundary effect, which causes great damage. Farmers would be shooting themselves in the foot.”

He is quick to dismiss other reports which reached different conclusions. Former chief Government scientist David King’s work ‘doesn’t come anywhere’ and he is ‘isolated’ in the scientific community, while the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee’s report was dismissed as a ‘couple of MPs spouting off the top of their heads’.

Mr Reedy, who remains friendly and calm but stubbornly resolute throughout, concedes the trust is ‘not dissatisfied’ with current Defra bTB policy, but refutes any suggestion of ‘victory’ for the badger lobby. “We have not won. We can flatter ourselves, but Hilary Benn’s decision was because of the ISG, it was nothing to do with us,” he says.

Nonetheless, the trust is clearly steeling itself for new challenges ahead. It is preparing to launch a Judicial Review of the decision to cull badgers in Wales once full details are known, and will be throwing ‘a barrage of explanation’ at a new Conservative Government, if there is one next year, in light of recent comments about badger culling by senior party figures.

“We will try and widen their information base. That is what we see as our job, to try and broaden the debate not to obfuscate anything in it,” he says. “Let us be persuaded by the science not brow beaten by emotion.”

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