Last August, Defra announced plans for a ‘refreshed’ bovine TB control badger strategy (here). On 30th January 2025, Defra issued Terms of Reference (here) for their ‘comprehensive new bovine TB review’, a look at ‘new’ science (since the last 2017 review), which will presumably significantly inform their ‘refreshed’ strategy. This included details of the scientific panel which will be reviewing ‘new’ evidence that has become available since the last review was published in 2018. We have blogged briefly about this here. A new strategy would be the first since that presented in 2014, by Owen Paterson when he was Secretary of State (here). At that time, Patterson said:
“If we do not get on top of the disease we will see a continued increase in the number of herds affected, further geographical spread and a taxpayer bill over the next decade exceeding £1 billion.”
This is exactly what has happened, and what Steve Reed the new Secretary of State could be about to repeat. The outline for the preparation of a new strategy is brief:
- First Bovine TB strategy in a decade to end badger cull and drive down TB rates to protect farmers livelihoods
- New holistic approach will ramp up cattle control measures, wildlife monitoring and badger vaccinations
- Proposals to be co-designed alongside farmers, vets, scientists, and conservationists to beat TB that devastates livestock farmers and wildlife
While Badger Crowd welcomes talk of an ‘end to the badger cull’, the new strategy proposals indicate that this is not guaranteed before the end of the current parliament (2029). This is completely unacceptable. The strategy proposes five more years of badger culling, all without sound scientific basis, and if implemented would result in the total number of culled badgers heading beyond 250,000, with no measurable disease benefit at all.
Holistic measures to ramp up cattle control measures are welcome, along with wildlife monitoring, but proposals for mass badger vaccination to be employed against bovine TB in cattle are based on unscientific beliefs, uncertainty and guesswork, using methods trialed and rejected in Wales. They are a further betrayal of what was promised and what is urgently needed. They are a scientifically unjustified continuation of the badger blame game, and as misguided as culling in terms of cattle TB control.
The scientific evidence just does not support the continued focus on badgers as a 50% source of bovine TB in cattle, despite the last Government’s claims and ill-informed media reports. There are no ‘benefits to bank’ . Yes, general on-farm hygiene improvements are sensible to prevent disease generally, but the real core need is to change the SICCT gold standard regulations, giving more control to farmers and vets to use a wider range of tests. Re-education of the sector on the science of bovine TB and wildlife, over which they have been misled for many years, is urgently needed.
Who could oppose the statement that “The full strategy will be co-designed with farmers, vets, scientists and conservationists”? But this has been said before, and implemented with secret committees and closed-door briefings, usually with those who are beholden to Defra for grants and favour. It is a breeding ground for vested interests and cover-ups.
Engagement with scientists involved in important peer-reviewed science that questions badger culling has been prohibited by Defra for at least five years (here and here), despite frequent requests for meetings or at least dialogue. Will there be continued resistance to accept the published science that challenges the views of those civil servants at Defra who have been pushing expensive and unethical policy for so long based on decades-old equivocal evidence? There is an uncomfortable history of bad decision making by those who now need to move along, to allow genuine progress.
What does the immediate future of
badger culling look like?
Intensive & supplementary culling
The Labour manifesto called badger culling ineffective. Sadly, since Labour’s election to power, Steve Reed (SoS for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (EFRA)), Sue Hayman (Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for EFRA), and Daniel Zeichner (Minister of State for Food Security and Rural Affairs) have all confirmed that the existing badger cull licences will be ‘honoured’ as they would have been under the previous Conservative administration. But where is the honour in doing the wrong thing? Culling will continue until January 2026. This condemned an estimated 15,000 mostly completely healthy badger adults and cubs to death in recent months and another 8,000 or so this year. How can a policy described by Labour as ineffective be implemented legally? There is no honour in retaining contracts that waste resources and distract from what really needs doing.
Targeted culling
On 14th March 2024, Defra launched a five-week consultation on the next steps to ‘evolve’ what they call ‘badger control policy’. If implemented, this would have involved ‘targeted’ culling of badgers, seemingly at the discretion of the Chief Veterinary Officer. An election and Labour victory meant that it was lawyers acting for Defra’s Secretary of State Steve Reed (and not the Conservatives Steve Barclay) that responded to a Judicial Review Application [AC-2024-LON-002292] against the ‘future of badger culling’ Consultation, as reported here. The ‘targeted’ badger culling proposals based upon Low Risk Area ‘hotspot’ (or epidemiological culling) were scrapped, although the new Labour government was unclear about its reasons. Effectively this decision provided the legal relief that the legal case sought and so it did not proceed to a hearing. As previously mentioned, the Secretary of State Daniel Zeichner has now instigated a fresh review of future bovine TB policy. It is largely the same academics from the 2018 review that have been appointed to undertake the new review.
Low-Risk Area Culling
On the 22nd August 2024, a new consultation on licensing of a new badger cull in the Low Risk Area appeared online. So Labour are not just re-authorising existing licences, they are planning to start new licences in new areas, this one in Cumbria in the Eden valley north and east of Penrith. This will have a 100% cull objective, repeating the failed epi-cull of the immediately adjoining area, the subject of a report in 2023 (see here). A cull that was demonstrably the most ineffective cull of all, because badger killing began when testing had cleared all herds in the area, beyond those chronically infected. There are rumours that two further LRA culls may be licenced in the future, possibly in Lincolnshire and Hertfordshire / Bucks and who knows where else? Labour have revised their public presentation to say all culling will finish by the end of this Parliament – by 2029. So supplementary and intensive culls will finish at the end of January 2026, and LRA culling with typically 3 years of culls can be started in 2025-2027. This will no doubt have lawyers sharpening their pencils.
How did we get here?
The intensive badger culls have been in progress since the policy began in 2013, bringing the total killed to May 2024, to around 230,000. Around 15,000 badgers were shot from June 1st 2024 to Jan 31 2025, although no figures have been released. More badgers will be in the sight-lines next year in supplementary culls, and additional ‘targeted’ culling plans are a possibility. Culled badgers have been predominantly healthy, killed on the premise of a hypothetical disease perturbation effect and supposed average 16% annual reduction in TB infections in cattle from culling, a concept designed by mostly Oxford academics that is now widely recognised as unsafe science and unrealistic extrapolation.
The recently published paper by Defra staff (Birch et al. (2024)) was being used to justify further culling in the March 2024 consultation, and falsely claiming that the culling programme thus far has been successful. With the Minister Steve Barclay stating “..bovine TB breakdowns in cattle are down by on average 56% after four years of culling..”. By sleight of presentation, he immediately confuses cause and effect. Authors of Birch acknowledge (on careful reading) that while they may speculate, the overall result cannot be attributed to badger culling: all disease measures implemented, including extensive testing, were analysed together with no control. There was no comparison of culled and unculled areas. It is far more likely to be cattle measures causing reduction in disease than badger culling, because decline began well before culling was rolled out. And in response to the introduction of annual SICCT testing in 2010 and short interval testing of infected herds. In truth it cannot attribute benefit and provides no insight at all. Other cattle-based measures were also introduced alongside culling. So it’s been more a case of ‘Fake 56% News’ confirmation bias.
Writing in a preamble to Badger Trust’s report ‘Tackling Bovine TB Together’, key badger ecologist and original RBCT scientist Professor David MacDonald writes that the authors of Birch “… do not claim to have measured the consequences of badger culling, and indeed they have not”, and, “there is still no clearcut answer regarding the impact of this approach to badger culling on controlling bTB in cattle or, more broadly, whether it’s worth it.”
Badger culls have previously been justified using the (decrepit) and guess-based ‘Risk Pathways’ approach of the Animal Plant and Health Agency (APHA) that purported to explain how disease arrives in a herd. Its ‘tick-based’ veterinary questionnaires implicated badgers as the default primary source of disease when adequate information and investigation was lacking. Following publication of the report ‘A bovine TB policy conundrum in 2023‘, in April 2023, (that led to the ‘dumping’), and with the speculative nature of their approach well exposed, APHA are now planning to use Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) and a sample of dead badgers to try to justify culling on a local basis. These two methods of pinning blame on badgers fall desperately short however, as they do not prove an exact route or rate of transmission from badger to cow. Such a route may not even exist, or may be occasional or exceptional, occurring as a result of the constant infection of the countryside by infected cows. Badgers will just be getting bTB from cows, as with strain 17z in Cumbria, and rarely if ever giving it back. The proposed system for justifying badger-blame is still rigged, unscientific and unethical veterinary practice.
Why, oh why, are APHA not checking back up to five or even ten years on moved stock to discover the improperly declared TB-Free source of new breakdowns? It would show them the true source of infection.
Refuting peer-reviewed science showing industry-led culling has shown no disease benefit
In their March consultation, Defra are at pains to continue to refute a study in the journal Veterinary Record (18 March 2022) by Tom Langton and veterinarians Mark Jones and Iain McGill. They do this on the basis of an un-peer reviewed letter published at the same time, which used incorrect data and made incorrect assertions about the methodology used, that was later corrected with some confused and unsubstantiated remarks. So where, 2 years later, is their measured alternative? Nowhere, because they can’t produce anything, even holding all the extensive data on individual farms in secret, as they do and always have. There are many ways they could test the data, so why don’t they? Or have they tested it but don’t like the results? There was no peer-reviewed rebuttal to Langton et al. under the old Conservative leadership with Defra refusing to meet and discuss. We have blogged about this sorry tale here and here and here.
Langton et al. 2022, was done in the most logical and clear-cut way using all the data. It shows what happens as unculled areas become culled, from 2013 onwards. The paper has two main findings. The first is really good news for farmers, cows and badgers. Data suggests that the cattle-based measures implemented from 2010, and particularly the introduction of the annual tuberculin skin (SICCT) test are responsible for the slowing, levelling, peaking and decrease in bovine TB in cattle in the High Risk Area (HRA) of England during the study period, all well before badger culling was rolled out in 2016.
The second finding came from looking at the amount of cattle bTB in large areas in the High Risk Area that had undergone a badger cull, and comparing it with the amount of disease in large areas in the High Risk Areas that had not had culling. It included a six year period 2013-2019, so before and after culling was rolled out. Multiple statistical models checked the data on herd breakdowns over time and failed to find any association between badger culling and either the incidence or prevalence of bovine TB in cattle herds. The models that most accurately fitted the data were those that did not include badger culling as a parameter, suggesting that factors other than culling (cattle testing) were more likely to be the cause of the reduction in disease in cattle. Badger culling efforts appear to be to no effect. A summary of this new research is available to read on our 18 March 2022 blog here. You can read an open access copy of the full paper here. A three minute video illustrating the work is available to view here.
Badger culling outcomes were always uncertain
With no analysis able to show a disease benefit from industry-led badger culling, the analysis from the original Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT) remains pivotal to any decision to cull badgers. Recently published in Scientific Reports, Torgerson et al (2024) challenges the certainty of this original analysis. Read more about this here.
Commenting on this work, Professor David MacDonald writes “They found that the conclusions of the 2006 analysis are sensitive to the method of analysis used. Indeed, the analytical approach that Torgerson’s team judge to be the most obvious for the purpose, provides no statistical evidence for a culling effect, whereas a model comparison method aimed at selecting a model with the best out-of-sample predictive power indicates that the best model does not include the treatment effect of killing badgers. According to those statistics, killing badgers during the RBCT made no difference to the herd breakdowns, whether measured by either OFT-W or by OFT-W + OFTS.” In other words, badger culling in the RBCT showed no measurable disease benefit using the most appropriate analyses. On this basis, all badger culling must stop immediately.
New response from original RBCT authors
On 21st August 2024, and as a response to Torgerson et al 2024, two of the authors of the original analysis of the RBCT from 2006 (together with a third author) published two new papers in the Royal Society Open Science (here and here). We have blogged about this here: multiple problems stand out. On 16th September 2024, a ‘Comment’ response to the new Mills et al. 2024 papers was submitted to the Royal Society Open Science: “Randomised Badger Culling Trial lacks evidence for proactive badger culling effect on tuberculosis in cattle: comment on Mills et al. 2024, Parts I & II”. An extended version was pre-printed with bioRxiv on 20th September.
The way forward
Rather than escalating badger culling to near 100% removal of the species from farmland with targeted culling (as demanded by the NFU), and continuing with Intensive, supplementary and low-risk culling, it is time to stop and implement the cattle-based measures that would finally get the disease under control. Dick Sibley has shown why cattle measures are failing (see here). A BBC documentary screened on BBC2 at 9.00pm 23rd August (and now available on BBC iplayer) does an excellent job of illustrating the problems of inaccurate cattle testing, and provides solutions – without culling badgers. Called ‘Brian May – the Badgers, the Farmers and Me’, it is a must see, and make the realities of the problem and current negligent approaches more visible.
It is time to stop living in the past and putting faith in unsubstantiated beliefs that controlling badgers can play a significant role in the control of the bovine TB epidemic.
If you support challenging the flawed science behind the badger cull and a parliamentary debate on the issue, please sign the petition linked below calling to “End the Badger cull and adopt other approaches to bovine TB control”:
