A UK Conservative MP has said “all wild animals” should be culled in response to conservation groups calling for an end to the badger cull.
Richard Drax, MP for South Dorset, made the comments at a debate on farming in the House of Commons. He said that culling badgers has been proven to help stop the spread of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) between farmed cows.
“Can I suggest that rather than talking about stopping culling on badgers and to introduce some other form, that all wild animals have to be culled,” he said. According to Drax, this is because animals such as deer and foxes have no natural predators in the UK, causing their health to “deteriorate.” He added: “We don’t want to wipe them out, we just simply want them controlled.”
More than 210,000 badgers have been killed since the cull began in England in 2013, according to the Badger Trust. The Badger Trust says the cull has not been effective in containing bTB, but the government disputes this.
What if we kept fewer cows, away from the badgers?
“Away from badgers” is the trick.
If we are going to keep cows at all - and even if we don’t eat them, they have a role to play in conservation grazing, and we could end up losing whole communities of wild plants and invertebrates in the UK without that grazing - then we would want them to be on good grassland - which is exactly the kind of habitat that badgers love, since they spend a good deal of time eating worms that are abundant in good grassland.
Fencing the badgers out? See here for the issues with that.
Keeping cattle in walled feedlots or similar? Hellish for the cattle and you still lose the benefits of conservation grazing.
If cows are used for conservation grazing, isn’t the problem of them getting TB non existent? The problem is people catching TB from cows through milk and close contact, not cows catching TB from badgers.
It’s probably not too great for the cows themselves, but yes, it wouldn’t be an issue for people.
However, the original point was the suggestion that cattle could be kept separate from badgers, and my response was just concerning the difficulty with that - no matter what the circumstances.
Theoretically. And if we abolished farming of cows. Sure that might be possible.
But logically 2 issues.
1 ) current laws require cow herd owners to test for TB if it is discovered in the area. And destroy the whole herd if one is found.
Cows still represent a cost to keep. So all those farmers will also tend to sell dairy to help fund the conservation land.
This also leads to the question that in some future where vegan laws or will prevents farming cows. How will motivation to fund keeping healthy cows be handled.