Tighter cattle controls, but no badger cull – ISG report

FARMERS in bovine TB hotspot areas face tighter cattle controls, but there will be no badger cull to tackle the reservoir of disease in wildlife, if Ministers accept recommendations from TB advisors published this week.

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Fears were expressed for the future of farming in the South West of England and other hotspot areas after the Independent Scientific Group on bovine TB (ISG) reported on the conclusions of its decade-long study into badger culling.

The core conclusion was that although badgers ‘contribute significantly to the cattle disease in some parts of the country’, culling them cannot reduce bTB in cattle ‘to any meaningful extent’.

The report categorically rules out all methods of culling, quashing any prospect of an imminent announcement by Ministers on the lifting of the moratorium on licences to cull badgers.

Some culling methods, including issuing licences to individual farms, would make matters worse due to the disturbance of badger social groups, it says.

Only by culling repeatedly over very large areas, particularly where natural barriers exist to limit badger movement, can small gains be made in disease control terms.

However, cost benefit analysis showed that this cannot be justified on economic grounds – culling as practised in the Randomised Badger Culling Trial would cost £123,000 for each breakdown prevented. Other methods would fare little better in economic terms, the report said.

“No practicable method of badger culling can reduce the incidence of cattle TB to any meaningful extent, and several culling approaches may make matters worse,” ISG chairman John Bourne said at an open meeting in London on Tuesday.

In the absence of wildlife controls, the only option left to Ministers was ‘further and stronger’ cattle controls, he said.

He said the ISG had shown that while badgers probably accounted for around 50 per cent of infection in some areas, cattle spread was the main cause of infection in others, partly due to ineffective controls.

“The ISG conclude that rigidly applied control measures targeted at cattle can reverse the rising incidence of disease, and halt its geographical spread,” Prof Bourne said.

He admitted, however, that there was no cost-benefit analysis to back up the recommendations made in the report. They include:

• Banning the movement of animals from ‘high risk’ farms – defined, for example, as those that have had bTB over the past three or four years – to ‘low risk’ farms.

• More rigorous pre-movement testing (PrMT) in high risk areas, plus, in some cases, isolation of oncoming animals and post-movement testing.

• Much greater use of the gamma interferon (IFN) test in PrMT and dealing with some herd breakdowns to speed up the process.

• Whole herd culling in the case of persistent outbreaks.

• More frequent routine testing in low risk areas.

Prof Bourne acknowledged his findings would ‘surprise some and be unwelcome to others’ but was unapologetic, insisting the ISG had delivered its objective of presenting Ministers with a sound scientific basis for TB policy.

Defra Secretary David Miliband responded by making it clear the ISG report would not be the only evidence on which he based his policy decisions.

“We will base our approach to tackling bovine TB on all the available evidence,” he said.

He expressed caution over additional cattle controls, warning that they would increase the cost of the TB regime, on top of the costs already faced by farmers and Government.

The farming industry responded with a mixture of defiance and anger.

Farming organisations refused to accept that the report signalled the end of the road for a badger cull and pledged to continue working with Defra to formulate a workable policy.

Farmers For Action leader David Handley issued a call to farmers to refuse to comply with TB testing rules, while Paul Griffith, Devon NFU county chairman, warned of ‘massive’ illegal badger culling if the Government accepted the recommendations.