Godfray Review 2025: Defra Revision? Correction? Or just further scientific howlers?

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On Friday 26th September, Defra changed the “Bovine TB strategy review update” but simply made things worse by adding another layer of confusion.

The correction of reported Information Criteria as now shown in the Godfray Review

An error was reported as “a revision to a line of code”. In the document itself, the change is referred to as a ‘cut and paste error.’ Red text in a box next to the correction (see above) suggests that ‘The rest of the analysis and interpretation is unaffected’.

The replacement red numbers, now show the  outputs from their 4 models described, but this time the difference between models 3 and 4 is insignificant. To put it in technical terms, a delta (difference) AICc of 0–2 suggests both models have similar support from the data.

However, far from the analysis and interpretation being unaffected as they suggest, the revision does have serious implications for the inferences drawn. The ‘update’ is actually a correction due to the wrong results being inserted into their models in Annex 4. The results reported as AICc (Akaike Information Criterion) were in fact the results from Baysian analysis (BIC) (which they did not report on).

However, BIC is not the correct IC for model selection, due to the small number of data points and large number of coefficients to estimate. The small sample size equivalent (was this really not tried?) would be appropriate (BICc), especially for logistic regression. Applying BICc favours a model which suggests that the incidence of herd breakdowns is independent of culling (i.e. culling produces no effect).

If AICc is used for model selection, a model suggesting a weak effect of culling is only slightly favoured, model 3: 173.58 vs model 4: 173.87. This difference is too small to draw any inference from; it is effectively a toss-up between the two models. The incorrectly reported IC results showed a bigger difference: model 3:151.58 vs model 4:159.38). It is this greater significant difference, which is what the peer-reviewers seem to have picked up on. Hence the big question, what were the peer reviewers sent? And given that one or both reviewer assumed the code was right, were they commenting on the wrong results?

Apparently Defra have been asked this all-important  question and an answer is pending. Maybe they don’t know and need to ask?  The answer could alter the Chapter 6 discussion hugely. A very large number of people are interested to find out who knew what and when.

The Information Criteria as originally presented in the Godfray review

One might pose the question “did the Godfray group try the small sample size BICc?” Given that they obviously tried BIC (as that is the output they incorrectly reported), the correct form of BIC would be the small sample size correction as there are only 20 data points. Interestingly, when BICc is applied, model 4 (without badger culling at 196.00) is favoured over model 3 (with badger culling at 200.96). I.e. badger culling has no effect.

However, notwithstanding all this incredible muddle,  it would have been more appropriate to select the most favourable model of a series of over-dispersed models, using the quasi version of AICc, which is QAICc, especially as the quasibinomial model was subsequently used for statistical inference.

When the QAICc is applied to their models, the results strongly favour a model which again suggests bTB incidence in cattle is independent of badger culling (i.e. culling produces no effect).

A pre-print outlining some of the problems with the new analysis is available here.

Reasonable people can disagree….

When dealing with the recent academic publications on the RBCT, (which have been reported on here), and which arrive at different conclusions, the Godfray review has stated at para 6.LXX:

“…reasonable people can disagree about the best way to analyse complex data such as these.”

That is an interesting response to the current differing views. A short article entitled “When Can Reasonable People Disagree?” is quite insightful on this. We borrow a couple of apposite quotes below:

“To say that “reasonable people can disagree” can encourage suspension of judgment in response to important matters of personal and social concern.”

“There is a related tendency to use the expression “reasonable people can disagree” to create an equivalence when it comes to conflicting beliefs that large groups of people hold. A common perception exists that if a large enough group of people believes something, it has met the litmus test for being a “reasonable’ belief and the people involved “reasonable people.” This is a familiar critical thinking error. The fact that a large group of people believes something does not provide us with a compelling reason for thinking it is true.”

“Respect for persons might require engaged listening. It might require careful consideration. It does not require treating weak evidence as if it is strong nor does it require treating unsound arguments as if they are sound. Far from being kind, we are actually doing one another an injustice when we engage one another as if all arguments are equally compelling.”

The point is, and it is a  point made by Prof mark Brewer earlier this year in his review of Torgerson et al 2025, it is more a question of can reasonable people agree?  And the answer to that appears to be not yet. But there  needs to be conversation. So far Defra has refused to have that conversation. Will that continue or does it have to wait until there is an inquiry into the crisis?

In any event, this muddle is so bad that the Godfray review will need to be rewritten. That is unavoidable now. The mistakes are too obvious, too profound and too important to remain as a part of the narrative.

While there is a ‘it doesn’t matter anyway’ type sentence to cover up any exposure, it is quite clear that it really does matter. The mistakes alter everything, including the economic forecast on badger culling benefit.  

Its time for Defra to change the way they do business.

 

 

Godfray BTB review update 2025: a failure to deliver.

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The Godfray review panel

In December 2024, rather than have an independent review, Defra re-appointed some of its familiar advisors to update their 2018 Bovine TB Strategy Review.  To consider “new evidence or analysis” published since 2018 that affects the recommendations made seven years ago.  The reported aim was to assist work on a new bovine TB (bTB) strategy for England for the spring of 2026. The DEFRA panel was mandated to:

  • review evidence and analysis published since 2018
  • look for improvements on BTB interventions set out in their 2018 Review
  • advise on gaps in the available evidence and disease control tools.

The authors were charged with producing these outputs as three chapters. But the result looks more like an effort to refresh old beliefs and hopes, aiming to keep the little acted-upon 2018 document afloat. The new report says it should be read alongside the 2018 review, but that is hard, with what is now overlapping groups of ideas across two documents. No one seems to have asked if the 2018 review was actually worth building upon or if perhaps ordering it in a more effective way was in order, so as to better the 2018 review.

In the report, the authors have looked selectively at the science, but not discussed its merits in any depth. Instead they have used their preferred  thoughts and policy suggestions, and much ‘hunch’ opinion comes through. And rather than accept peer-reviewed published science on the RBCT that they don’t like, they have done some of their own analyses – as posted earlier (here). These analyses are selective and lack scientific rigour. They then finesse the muddle by saying any demise of the RBCT  does not really matter anyway. So why did they go to all the effort of the unsuccessful rescue effort then? 

The overall impression is of a report trying to help Defra to ‘carry on regardless’, with failing measures and with a few changes here and there, rather than looking forward with clear fresh direction and determination, as the exercise required. After all, the 2018 recommendations were largely, either rejected, not adopted, adopted in part or merely paid lip service to. The result has been a failure to reach the 2025 mid-point policy targets. 

The fact that Daniel Zeichner (now fired and  replaced as Minister of State by Angela Eagle, after only a little over a year), reappointed largely the same conflicted group of individuals from 2018, may relate to him coming into the job with the wrong briefing on bovine TB.

Zeichner failed to recognize, and act on considerable issues within his struggling bTB department. A department  too embedded in the wrong moves, he was too slow to realise. Zeichner and DEFRA simply chose to dismiss early concerns over lack of impartiality in the Godfray re-appointments. A 50,000 strong petition calling for scrutiny of Oxford’s statistics, a six thousand strong petition and public demonstrations in Oxford about the lack of independence of panel members, some of whom held multiple conflicts of interest, made no difference to the Defra back-room advising the Minister. Academics most conflated in the scientific controversies at Oxford and Cambridge Universities would be ‘marking their own homework’ for Defra again, at taxpayer expense. 

Labour’s incoming policy emphasis last July was all about moving away from badger culling. But it did not let go of the Defra obsession to focus so highly on badgers, as their unproven significant vector.  This suggests that the usual suspects within DEFRA and APHA, by now captured and tribalised by industry interests saw that their best strategy was to play for time. It seems that their aim was to slow down policy change to phase out culling. They were perhaps keen not to risk the truth being made public, which might enable the NFU to reclaim huge costs spent on  killing badgers to no effect. Perhaps to play a waiting game in order to bring culling back in a few years time to satisfy strong industry beliefs, spawned by bad (Godfray) science. It is, after all, the measure that Defra has long ‘hung it hat’ on, as the key tool in its mythical tool box. The measure that Boris Johnson as Prime Minister took away from George Eustice back in 2020. The measure that originates largely from Oxford University getting the science wrong, time and time again. And now getting it wrong once more.

This outcome has been on the cards since Defra announced they had made the Godfray panel appointments earlier this year (see here). The panel included Professors Charles Godfray and Bernard Silverman from the University of Oxford, and Professor James Wood University of Cambridge. Godfray and Wood had major roles in supporting badger culling for Defra, and were unlikely to change their rewarded positions on the issue. Also on the panel was Professor Glyn Hewinson, who has spent a professional lifetime (now at Aberystwyth University) working to try to seek new testing methods, and Professor Michael Winter of the University of Exeter. Professor Christl Donnelly was recused from the panel, with prior concerns raised over RBCT badger cull policy statistics.   

The update report looks like it has been collated by Defra staff with major input from James Wood, with excessive detail on worries about cattle vaccination. With Bernard Silverman looking at Badger cull statistics. Use of a mix of numbers and roman numerals for paragraphs looks a bit clunky.

The report suggests that there is a ‘small chance’ of being TB-Free by 2038. Saying that it is ‘challenging but achievable’ is not so much a stretch as an impossibility, and Defra have confirmed they have no position on when TB Freedom will occur. 

Here the departure from reality looks a bit desperate, it shows a detachment from any  understanding of where the epidemic control crisis is truly positioned. Farmer representatives cannot possibly look at this document with anything other than grave concern and scepticism.

This ‘small chance’ of TB-Freedom in 2038, must be maddening to those at the ‘coal face’ who know that the disease control policy is failing and poor scientific advice is the major driver.  And it is not due to a lack of investment, but how finances have been managed that is at fault. The self-praise that TB Hub is ‘very good’ is revealing. It has long been a mouthpiece for dubious ideas and advice. 

Chapter 3: Surveillance and diagnostics in cattle.

After the introduction and background, the first topic chapter recognizes some of the more obvious and burgeoning issues with the current approaches that were underplayed in the 2018 review and are already published for anyone caring to look:

  • Mother to calf infections are important
  • That TB-Free status awarded on release from breakdown is often false, undisclosed residual infection is rife, and is driving the epidemic in cattle (and wildlife)
  • The low sensitivity of the SICCT test means it should be replaced with the SICT test, the test used successfully in other countries
  • Better testing will significantly contract the cattle industry due to the volume of infected animals that have been generated by the failed system since 2001
  • Ways to safely quarantine infected cattle for slaughter to prevent spread both to other cattle and wildlife and avoid industry contraction have not been determined
  • Data sharing is incoherent, despite £183 Million being spent to-date

Yet there is a nod to the work by Robert Reed and Dick Sibley and others at Gatcombe Farm in Devon, and elsewhere, as expounded in the ‘Brian May’ BBC Panorama documentary of 2024. The need to be able to use alternative tests is recognized, as is the use of tests without compulsory slaughter of reactors. This  opens the way for a more nuanced system. These avenues are mentioned but lost in a list of many other things without weighting or priority. The system to implement such measures is another story and could have been mapped out. Defra is stuck in ‘can’t afford it’ mode, but a report like this won’t help them.

The media headline announcement of the review update on 4th September was a warning that Covid-style control funding is needed – so perhaps a few hundred £Mn or £Bn per year? How likely is this in the current economic climate? How much is really needed and for what? Where is the cost-benefit analysis or doesn’t it look too good? Will the government simply look to pass on the problem to the next administration, as previous ones have done, or look to sort out the long running disaster? Other neglected animal health crises suggest ‘wait and see’ is the present strategy, so the reports vagaries might not have bothered Defra too much.

Chapter 4: The Disease in Cattle

Reading through all the uncertainties and caveats in this section, the reader is led to the conclusion that bTB cattle vaccination is unlikely work any better than it is working now any time soon, and that it might be undeliverable at scale. Some of the claims are un-evidenced and a DIVA test that works is the unconvincing ‘maybe’ of old. This could almost be interpreted as a recommendation to drop the whole thing and let those involved slip away, rather than invest yet more shiploads of funding. It is hard to see any excellence in this direction. 

Chapter 5: Cattle movements and Risk-based trading

Obviously linked to diagnostics, the general lack of cattle movement control monitoring and poor biosecurity offers bleak prospects. The problems are well known, but little is being done to improve them. Suggesting that only 25% of Low Risk Area infections are due to cattle movements implies continued denial and/or incompetence. The update fails to identify a credible and rapid way forward to stop what the EU call ‘the British national sport of moving cows around’. The links between biosecurity, risk-based trading, slaughter compensation and a potential insurance approach are further covered in Chapter 8. But until the basic elements of disease control are sorted out (moving diseased cattle infects the herds they are moved to), and the truth separated from the fiction, it is hard to see who is going to believe in, support and enforce any such extensive controls.

Chapter 6: The Disease in Wildlife

Here the authors are writing to defend a failing battle to promote badger interventions. Charles Godfray and James Wood are two of the academics who have pushed them as effective. Godfray via the original Randomised Badger Culling Trial RBCT experiment where he was a DEFRA audit contractor, and Wood being the post 2013 media cheerleader for culling “working” generally, and attacking those questioning biased government propaganda. Predictably they recommend that badger interventions are still necessary to control bTB in cattle. 

With Bernard Silverman replacing Christl Donnelly (both at Oxford University Statistics), the face-off between the Paul Torgerson and Donnelly camps over the RBCT analyses that has played out recently in the Royal Society Open Science journal comes to the fore (see here). The review finds in favour of Torgerson on statistical use of rate/count in the ‘battle of the models’, but Silverman has gone beyond his remit to review, and has actually done his own analysis, with code published as Annex 4. He attempts to ‘rescue’ the RBCT, albeit with low statistical significance.  However, having diminished the holy-grail RBCT study significance from strong to weak, he has used the wrong output data for his result. When his published model is followed properly, badger culling is shown to have no effect, (see pre-print here). Thus the Godfray report fully invalidates the RBCT – this may take a few weeks to sink in across academia. And of course with the Donnelly 2006 analysis relegated, the plethora of papers that reply on it and/or use the same analytical method fall with it. And there are a lot of them.

Silvermans substantial oversight unravels the arguments made in the rest of the chapter to try to justify the badger interventions since 2013. It is embarrassing for the authors to try to bury their past positions on this issue, and this is the reason so many people said they were unsuitable to undertake the review update. This surely cannot be lost on Defra who put them there. It undermines the whole report.

What else did they get wrong? Well for a start, the pre-printing of the ‘Robertson’ analysis (currently un-reviewed). This work was, one suspects, commissioned by Defra officials to try to discredit (see here and here) the 2022 study showing badger culling to be ineffective. Robertson was seconded to Natural England from APHA for some months to undertake the work. Badger Crowd understands that Godfray suggested that it be pre-printed to back up his unwavering view that badger culling has “worked”. This analysis using unqualified guesswork and simulated data has not moved on since it was shared by Natural England back in 2023. Requests for the code used in the work have been ignored. Badger Crowd understands that it has not been submitted to a journal, and it is not difficult to see why. More on this red herring will be revealed shortly.

Perhaps the largest deception of all is that the Godfray review update attempts to characterise the badger issue as one where key decisions are political not scientific, with progress hampered by unmovable positions by those with extreme views. This is a gross simplification. Hard-core protagonists or deniers have little or no hands-on involvement or power. It is the scientists who have got it wrong, and blaming politicians has come from overconfidence, and an apparent need now to blame others for a mess of their own creation, over nearly three decades.

This smokescreen report is an unsuccessful effort to excuse poor progress and to hide the academic mistakes on this issue over the last 25 years. Godfray and his Oxford colleagues are themselves implicated. The flaws and deceptions have the potential to damage Oxford University and Defra very badly, as Zeichner was warned in the spring. They will damage Labour as well, on whose watch the errors were constructed.  If they don’t recognize the scale of the problems immediately and involve a broader team of visibly independent scientists, nothing can change. What is needed is an independent inquiry along the lines recommended by Professor Mark Brewer, head of Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland, in June of this year. Unless that happens, the British cattle and dairy industries are doomed to years, if not decades, of more failure with taxpayers footing the growing bill. £Billions more wasted, decades of cruelty and misery for animals and farmers.

Trying to use genomics arguments to sustain badger interventions as a last ditch effort is fanciful, but that is the route that  Defra have taken. They may be preparing to use trap-side testing in the predictable back-route preparation for Test Vaccinate Remove (TVR). It is an effort to replay the very old record to ‘blame the badgers’ to ‘keep the farmers happy’. Who was it who first named the policy ‘lies, deceit and negligence?’ Surely this time the farmers are wiser?

In short, the Godfray reviews in 2018 and 2025 have simply failed to deliver when it comes to setting the scene for resolving the bovine TB crisis in England. Defra is set on a path that was presumably decided with the NFU once Labour took targeted culling away last August. There is practically no chance that central government will fund a Covid-style response to bTB when the science as presented is so incoherent. Maybe confusion and no change is the plan? There is important work to be done to get bovineTB under control, but there is no sound evidenced route to a TB free England in this review. Bring on an independent Inquiry.

2038 Bovine TB targets on the scrap heap, with details of failed policy increasingly exposed

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Why was the use of Gamma interfreon testing, alongside use of the tuberculin test (SICCT), under-declared in APHA’s central bovine TB control evaluation paper (Birch et al 2024) last year, and also in the newly published ‘Godfray’ report?

Gamma reactors by cull year 2009 – 2023

A letter published today 19th September, in Veterinary Record, details the amount of supplementary Gamma testing that was introduced in the High Risk and Edge Areas before and during the post 2013 mass badger culls. It shows how Gamma testing was under-emphasised in the Birch et al. analysis on the effect of the poorly labelled ‘Badger Control Policy’, (see here). Considerable disease benefit is being claimed for badger cull in its first two years and beyond, but is far more likely to simply be linked to the increase in cattle testing with Gamma, as recorded publicly by number of gamma test reactors found.

What this shows is that Defra knew well that Gamma could find undisclosed infection, no surprise as it has been used in other countries for decades. They used it to help lower the spread of disease, then purposefully eased off, as badger culling was phasing down in more recent years. Who, you have to ask, was controlling this behaviour? And why?

As Badger Crowd has pointed out before (see here), all disease measures implemented, including extensive testing, were analysed together, with no control areas. There was no comparison of culled and unculled areas as the recent Godfray Review very strangely mis-reported.

Data presented with the Vet Record letter shows how easing off of the use of Gamma testing to supplement SICCT testing in 2022 is likely to have hindered disease control. This reduction in Gamma was said to be due to lack of EU funding, but this was surely predictable. So why were farmers and the public not told that the strategy was being derailed? A freedom of information disclosure in April 2025 concerning the likelihood of
bTB freedom being achievable under present conditions of testing and cattle controls, produced the following response: ‘APHA has not yet produced models suitable for predicting whether TB eradication will be achieved in England by 2038, or when TB eradication will be achieved.’ The 25-year bTB eradication strategy published in 2014, with a 2038 projected target of bTB freedom (elimination or near elimination) now, on current trajectory, has an end point beyond 2060.

As has been pointed out many times before, there is an urgent need for the use of other immune-assay tests and phage testing to be authorised alongside SICCT and Gamma IFN-γ tests, and for farm vets to be provided with extensive new advice and guidance. With freedom to test bTB out from herds – this is mentioned in the Godfray report but it should have been front and centre.

The money raid on central government funds requested in the Godfray review would have been credible with a report triaging essential priorities. But instead, like the 2018 report, the 2025 report is muddled and incoherent. Progress, especially in England, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland simply will not materialise if Defra continue along his line.

References

Birch et al (2024)
Langton, Griffiths & Griffiths (2025)

 

Godfray ‘science’ report simply adds to the bovine TB chaos

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Panel Chair: Professor Sir Charles Godfray

The long-awaited ‘Godfray’ report, a review of scientific evidence since 2018 concerning bovine TB in cattle, was published on 4th September. Commissioned by Defra, it is supposed to feed into a ‘comprehensive new bovine TB strategy’ that was announced in August 2024 by the incoming Labour government. It is the science that the new policy should be based on, so it is an important – and needs to be sound. More details will follow on the entirety of the report, but this is what was said about badgers and bovine TB

Panel epidemiologist: Professor James Wood

Chapter 6: The Disease in Wildlife focuses on badgers. The report does not deal head-on with the Royal Society Open Science pre-publication review by Prof Mark Brewer. This  claimed that models suggesting ‘badger culling works’ were ‘naïve at best’. Instead, a newcomer to the issue, statistician Prof Bernard Silverman (a colleague of Christl Donnelly at Oxford University) has tried to rescue the situation & restore statistical validity to show some positive disease benefit.

Panel statistician: Professor Sir Bernard Silverman

Silverman  presents a new set of models. He confirms (para. 65) in a massive ‘wake-up’ finding that a paper by  Prof Torgerson’s study group in June of this year did show that the key 2006 RBCT paper by Donnelly and others, in short, got the modelling wrong. This has massive implications for a wide number of papers that have used that paper’s calculations to build further models. It must cause a tsunami of scientific correction, or the retraction of dozens of publications that have been used to promote  badger culling over the last 20 years. This is potentially one of the biggest shake-up’s in biological science, for a generation. The ‘perturbation effect hypothesis’ evaporates, for example.

Panel member: Professor Glynn Hewinson

Instead of the huge significance claimed in 2006 for badger culling, Silverman has tried to produce a  model that ‘just about’ finds an effect from badger culling, providing ‘weaker evidence for a positive effect’.  But nevertheless, at first glance, it might save Oxford’s blushes. The problem is that he gets to this position in a manner that is both unconvincing, and incorrect.

Panel member: Professor Michael Winter

Firstly, there has been a major howler. Not just from Silverman but the two peer-reviewers asked to check his models, and Defra officials who supervised the process. Annex 4 of the Godfray report outlines the binomial model he has used, but gives the wrong information criteria (ic) outputs. These are standard applications that test how well the model fits the data. He claims to have used what is called Akaike, but instead presents Bayesian outputs. One assumes that this was not intentional, but rather a transcription error.

However, in addition to this, he has failed to address the fact that for binomial models with small sample sizes (the RBCT was an experiment with a small sample size – just ten paired comparisons), his binomal approach should have used a particular type of Akaike information criteria. When applied, results suggest that models showing a benefit from badger culling are those least supported. The best supported models are those that do not include badger culling, indicating badger culling had no effect. Even if he had decided that the Bayesian approach was the correct way to evaluate the models, the small sample size variant should have been used and this too makes badger culling the wrong model to favour from a statistical, hence scientific perspective. A pre-print outling the problems is available here.

So any ‘merit on both sides’ of the current modelling debate, the football equivalent of a score draw, does not apply as he had hoped. Torgerson’s analyses win handsomely on penalties and the RBCT is relegated.

For the benefit of stats geeks wanting to understand more, it is also fair to say that with Poisson regression, it is easy and quite natural (and now accepted by all), to include ‘time at risk’ in the model (as an offset), which is why Poisson regression would be the preferred method for the analysis. With binomial regression, to do this properly you need to have the complementary log-log function in the link. Again, when this is done, there is no effect of culling. Silverman has also not dealt with overfitting – there are too many parameters for the number of data points. He also fails to address the ‘all reactors’ argument that another chapter recommends needs ‘more research’. Could this be because finding in favour of using ‘all reactors’ would be yet another route to showing the data finds badger culling to have had no effect. Saving the RBCT is more important than admitting this essential pointer for cattle management?

The implications of a flawed report to the Minister are huge for Defra and Godfray, who chose Silverman to try to rescue the unsavable. It looks such a crude attempt that the new Minister (Zeichner has now gone) will have some difficult explaining to do. Do farmers get their money back for doing something pointless for the last 12 years, and do wildlife charities get compensation for rightly fighting, at huge cost, a scientifically botched policy? It’s going to be interesting. And if culling doesn’t work, neither will badger vaccination or TVR, which appears to be Defra’s new direction of choice. The second Godfray report could potentially be seen as a back-covering exercise to try to protect Oxford University, but it has not succeeded.

This is grounds for a major inquiry, with standards of scientific integrity and the impartiality of appointments under the spotlight. Badger culling would never have been sanctioned if the RBCT had got its statistics correct back in 2006.

 

Cattle testing with Gamma interferon

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On 19th August, Defra sent an email to ‘stakeholders’ announcing that as part of the work to refresh the bTB strategy, it will be “enhancing test sensitivity in cattle herds”. This is “to help identify infected cattle which may not have been detected by the skin test.” This news doesn’t seem to have been reported very widely, but has been covered by South West Farmer.

Defra say:

“At present, mandatory interferon-gamma (‘gamma’) blood testing applies to certain TB breakdown herds in the High Risk Area (HRA) and six-monthly surveillance testing parts of the Edge Area of England.  We are working to extend gamma testing to all herds experiencing a new breakdown with Officially Tuberculosis Free Withdrawn (OTFW) status in the HRA and six-monthly parts of the Edge Area. ”

“Therefore, farmers with eligible herds in these areas will be able to apply to APHA from 01 September 2025 for government-funded gamma testing as a voluntary option. All cattle with a positive gamma test result will be removed and usual valuation and compensation procedures will apply.”

“Using the skin and gamma tests together is proven to increase test sensitivity, particularly in herds where Bovine Tuberculosis has already been identified.  This means infected animals can be detected and removed from the herd earlier, reducing the spread of the disease within the affected herd and the risk of future breakdowns after the herd has regained its Officially TB Free (OTF) status.”      

This change is a voluntary one. If you don’t want to know whether your cattle have bTB using Gamma, you’re not obliged to find out. While the option for extra testing is welcome, it raises some interesting questions.

Strange Timing?

Government’s updated bTB control strategy is scheduled for spring 2026. It is to take its lead from a  ‘Godfray Group’  review of new science published since the 2018 review, and this new review is expected shortly.

So why the urgency to push Gamma now?  Could it be that APHA’s ‘Year End Descriptive Epidemiology Reports’ show that their long-term objective of reducing OTF-W (Officially TB Free Withdrawn) incidence to less than 1% has absolutely no hope of success & they really can’t afford to delay any longer?

Might Godfray have decided that OTF-S (Officially TB Free Suspended) is in reality a sufficiently accurate measure of new infection (see explainer), and the implication of this is that any fall in bTB has been modest and is levelling off to reflect the inadequate capacity of the flawed current approaches. Could the very high profile bTB breakdown at Clarkson’s Diddly Squat Farm have had some influence in this decision? (See Farmers Weekly take on this). Clarkson did say he would be speaking to officials at Defra…. It appears, incidentally, that he has bought from herds that have been in breakdown over the last five years or so.

It was use of Gamma that has reduced bTB since 2013

APHA’s scientific paper analysing the results of the Badger Culling Policy (BCP) (Birch et al 2024) claimed a 56% bTB reduction benefit over the period of badger culling. What it failed to articulate with clarity was that BCP  was really a mixture of culling, increased frequency SICCT cattle testing and the introduction of Gamma testing in badger cull areas, and much earlier than indicated in that report.

Mis-describing the extent and timing of use of Gamma, that paper implied, with muddled wording, that badger culling was responsible for the disease benefit measured. The reality is that declines in bTB most closely mirror the introduction of enhanced cattle measures. Analysis of competing models in Langton et al 2022 suggested that the best random effects model was the one without badger culling as a co-variate; all the random effects models which included ‘cull’ failed to identify an effect of culling. Perhaps this is beginning to sink in at Defra.

What about the other cattle tests?

Anybody who has watched the BBC’s “Brian May: the Badgers, the farmers and me” will know that extensive efforts using a suite of cattle tests have been trialed for 10 years by vet Dick Sibley at Gatcome Farm in Devon. Working around Defra’s strict and problematic rules about the use of cattle testing, this groundbreaking work has shown not only how different tests can be used to identify the disease at different times in the life of cattle, but also how to use such a process to effectively manage infected animals to minimize spread. Where then, is the plan to utilize the full range of cattle tests that could be used to drive down disease?

So, is the new introduction of optional Gamma testing a token response to the clear failure of badger culling and recognition of a need for change?  Alone, it will simply find more disease, delay OTF declaration and drive up OTF-S and OTF-W figures.  An increase that misguided commentators will then no doubt claim is ‘due to badger culling being stopped’.

It’s too little too late; whether or not Defra attempt to cling to the flawed RBCT publications and  badger blame game is about to be revealed. Their problem is that they surely won’t want to admit they wasted  £100’s of millions and killed 250,000 badgers for nothing, so they may well be reluctant to accept what has become obvious to the world of science and statistics; badgers have not been shown to be a significant factor in the control of bovine TB in cattle herds.

England’s bovine TB control

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The world watches and wonders……..

The interest and outrage generated by the English badger culls over the last thirteen years is huge and continues to grow. But as time has gone on, the problems have also attracted a growing international following. Bovine TB is, after all, an international problem. Since 2019, there have been multiple readers from 96 countries and dependencies:

 

 

 

 

 

 



Austria, Algeria, American Samoa, Argentina, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Benin, Bermuda, Brazil, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Gambia, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Guernsey, Hong Kong SAR, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Isle of Man, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jersey, Kenya, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Mauritius, Mexico, Monaco, Montenegro, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nepal, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Rwanda, Senegal, Slovenia, Switzerland, Spain, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Serbia, Slovakia, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Syria, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Türkiye, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, Vietnam, Venezuela and Zambia.

How do  other countries view the disastrous situation the UK has got itself into? Do they also have government departments committed to upholding out of date analyses and opinions at the expense of adopting newer and better disease control protocols? They must surely be baffled by the obvious reluctance of the decision makers in London to engage with scientists who offer real hope for progress in the disease control process, with potential benefits that are readily apparent. The refusal of government to involve published scientists who have called out errors and oversights must be perplexing, as must the refusal to place any value on the lives and welfare of badgers as part of the wildlife wealth of the UK. The latter remains an unexplained moral and ethical black hole. This is a major international embarrassment for the UK in front of an academic and veterinary world audience.

We hope that despite England’s ongoing intransigence on this distressing issue over decades, our reporting of the science of bovine TB in recent years  is helping to inform other countries who need to know the limitations of the tuberculin and gamma tests, as they are used in UK and Ireland. They need to know, where whole herd depopulation is not an option, how a new protocol to remove the disease from a herd is what is needed;  a wider range of cattle tests used more frequently and according to need is vital.

In the UK, it is now clear that badgers have not been shown to play a significant role in the persistence of bTB in cattle herds. While more research is needed into this disease in all manner of wildlife, its respiratory nature suggests that the source of new infection in cattle is overwhelmingly other cattle; the necessary close contact between cattle and deer/badgers/fox etc just doesn’t happen in normal circumstances. Cattle that are carrying bTB, however, are able to remain undetected for many years by DEFRA’s tests of choice, the SICCT and Gamma tests. And infected cows get traded and moved, and take their infection to a new area and new animals. Only when this is better understood and accepted will vets and farmers  be able to sustainably manage livestock in rural areas without disrupting ecosystems nearby that are vulnerable to careless exploitation.

 

Summer news roundup

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The  parliamentary summer recess has begun. There can be no more Parliamentary Questions until the recall in September. Which is more than a shame, because there are questions that still need to be answered about the badger cull and bovine TB policy, by a government that does not engage properly with many stakeholders and the public. Supplementary badger cull (SBC) and Low Risk Area licenses were issued in May, and badger shooting is underway, with more authorisations expected for intensive culling shortly. These last intensive cull licenses will almost certainly be issued later this month to allow even more culling in the autumn. But the science to support this policy has been successfully challenged in the literature, with independent verification and a call for proper investigation – yet we still have silence from a government that just wants to finish its ugly killing spree.

Zeichner visit to Gatcombe Farm

The Minister of State for Food Security and Rural Affairs Daniel Zeichner visited Gatcombe Farm in Devon a few weeks ago. This is the farm at the centre of the ground breaking Save Me Trust BBC documentary last year that was attacked by some of the nastier elements of the bTB world, including Defra-funded bodies. Gatcombe is where an innovative protocol for cattle testing has been investigated over the last ten years or so, using carefully managed, newer and more sensitive tests. Each test can be used to target bTB to better increase chance of detection. Used in combination, in a manner prohibited for general use by current rules, the new protocol has been successful in identifying infection that would previously be left hidden in the herd. Let’s hope Zeichner sees the potential to finally start on changes to policy that were needed many years ago, using the cattle measures that DEFRA staff have fought so hard to resist.

Godfray Review report postponed

The current review of bovine TB science, the first one published back in 2018, was commissioned by the new Labour government last year and was due to report by the end of June. But in June, this was officially changed to ‘from the end of June’. Badger Crowd understands that it will now appear towards the end of the year, but an exact time has not been announced. This could, perhaps, be partly due to the publication on June 11th of a paper in Royal Society Open Science that confirmed that previous core Government reference science, the RBCT, was in fact based on ‘a basic statistical oversight’, and that more  plausible analyses of the results showed no effect of badger culling from the £50 Million experiment.

APHA produces a pre-print to oppose the 2022 appraisal finding no cull benefits

A pre-print has appeared on BioRxiv: ‘Evaluating the effect of badger culling on TB incidence in cattle: a critique of Langton et al. 2022’ authored by DEFRA’s Andy Robertson. Robertson has worked for TBHub, APHA, Natural England and is based at DEFRA. His publications have twice wrongly claimed badgers are a known maintenance host for cattle TB.

The new pre-print, three years in the preparation, claims that if badger culling had ‘worked’, (created disease decline benefit), the Langton et al analysis might not have detected it. As ever with DEFRA bTB publications, computer code for the model and simulations used is not provided, so it is impossible to check that what has been done is correct or plausible. Code was requested from DEFRA on July 21, but there has been no response at all.

Much of the text leans heavily on published studies that have now been shown to be uncertain at best. The Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) paper (Birch et al., published March 2024) in particular is misrepresented as evidence of a positive effect of badger culling. Accurate interpretation of that paper shows that there was no attempt in it to see if badger culling contributed to the general decline in bTB in herds under progressively tighter cattle testing methods. The critique glosses-over an important finding in Langton et al. 2022 (that Defra acknowledged at the time), that at the county level, bovine TB incidence stabilised, and started to decline, well before badger culling was rolled out.

Badger Vaccination

The governments new agreement to fund the NFU  £1.4 Mn badger vaccination trials in Cornwall has been widely reported since January. It has been in the news again recently, yet there are still scant details available on the scientific and analytical protocol of the work. Aspects follows a similar project in Wales many years ago, that led to it being dropped as a strategic option.

Requests for further information from DEFRA have met the usual wall of silence. DEFRA’s Minister Sue Hayman half-answered a PQ on the project last week saying “Unlike previous badger culling studies, the Cornwall Badger Project is focused on testing different methods of delivering badger vaccination, rather than evaluating the impact on bovine TB in cattle.” So the use of badger vaccination as a tool in cattle TB control is not being measured? This despite NFU saying that is the essential question that needs answering. It all looks so half-baked and ‘un-joined up’ at DEFRA.

Jeremy Clarkson’s herd is OTF-S

As reported here, it was bad news for Jeremy Clarkson recently. Positive and inconclusive tuberculin tests on his cattle mean that Diddly Squat Farm now has the status Officially TB Free-Suspended. With viewing figures of 4-5 million, Clarkson is in a good position to put the disastrous government bovine TB policy into the public consciousness. Costing over £100Mn a year, the result of the policy has been an immense waste of time and resources. With a hidden epidemic that is still not being effectively detected, and 250,000 mostly healthy badgers culled, many cruelly, due to ‘statistical oversights’ and a government mired in its inability to get a proper grip. If Ministers want to do farming a huge favour, they will get the right experts to look at the evidence, and having procrastinated for over a year, instigate immediate radical change. Forget badgers, it is correct cattle testing and movement control  procedures that will rapidly bring herds into manageable condition, as it did in the 1960’s.

Will anything new be offered before the intensive badger culling starts again in September? Probably not. The lack of urgency on this issue is incredibly disappointing. Whatever Labour’s manifesto intentions were, it seems that the civil servants have the whip hand here, holding on to their dogma and their wrong advice and roles, resisting rather than following the new science. It is the public purse, the farmers, cows and badgers who are paying the price of ineffective government.

Is Diddly Squat Farm seeing the light on bovine TB testing and spread?

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The Diddly Squat Farm, owned by TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson and a part of the ‘Clarkson’s Farm TV show’, was the subject last week of multiple media reports on positive bovine TB tests in their small cattle herd. Perhaps the most dreaded event for any cattle owner and the prelude to an often long, expensive and heart-breaking series of events.

Reports suggest that a pregnant cow, with a calf that has been separated, is a positive reactor and to be slaughtered, while a bull and a few other cattle have produced tuberculin test results labelled ‘inconclusive’. Inconclusive results usually indicate an active infection, but not one where TB lung lesions are necessarily detectable.

England uses a SICCT test system that is failing and outdated; see the explainer here. In Wales, the SICCT test, with its extremely high specificity, is now read at ‘severe interpretation’,  meaning that the ‘positive’ cut-off point (difference in bump size) is lowered so that some animals classified as ‘inconclusive reactors’ at the standard interpretation are now classified as full ‘reactors’ for management purposes. Wales has made similar progress to England without badger culling. Not finding TB on culture (in the lab) at post-mortem for some cows at slaughter, often happens simply because the infection is at too early a stage for the lesions to be visible to the eye, but that doesn’t mean they are not infectious.

The Daily Telegraph immediately, and relying on traditional anti-badger rhetoric, jumped to the conclusion that the infection was from badgers:

“Clarkson has spoken before about how badgers are rife on his farm and how he has tried to keep them away from his cows. But even with an Amazon budget and celebrity profile, the presenter was unable to stop transmission of the bacteria from badger to cow.”

But Clarkson confirmed that badgers have been heavily culled in his area in multiple yeas of culling ending last October. There are even reports that some of the badger setts in the area have been stopped up by others. So in an interview on Times Radio he is rightly uncertain as to how the disease arrived.             

As with the majority of new bovine TB infections, the source is most likely to be undisclosed TB in purchased stock. Government’s external veterinarian of choice, Cambridge University’s James Wood claimed recently (on Farming Today) that:

“The challenge is with this [testing] system, the controls are imperfect, so that when we clear a farm with TB we know that a proportion that maybe as high as 25 or 50%, a proportion will have one or two animals that are still likely to be infected.“

Infection embedded in herds and traded onwards to new herds is the real problem. A simple check on the bTB status of herds that Clarkson has bought from in recent years will soon show if individuals are from herds that have had infection over the half dozen years or more. This is towards the upper bounds of the length of time that bTB is known to ‘hide’, due to some individual cows not responding to testing and the poor sensitivity (lots of false negatives) of tests used.

Clarkson recognises that the bTB system is a failure and questions why if TB meat can be eaten, the strict measures are absolutely needed. The fact that since pasteurisation was brought in bTB is not a significant human health risk is important, but Defra have rejected a rethink to relax massive public spending, and for it to be dealt with in a similar way to Johnes disease. Which is caused by a similar and widespread bacteria, spread by faecal contamination. Hence farmers face a draconian system imposed without access to alternative and better tests that Government have long-suppressed.

If Jeremy Clarkson can shine a light into the murky depths of bovine TB control policy and he does so with the appropriate seriousness, he will be doing farming a huge favour. But he will have to careful  where he gets his advice and information from; that will dictate how successful he is. There are plenty of people giving bad advice, for all sorts of reasons.

The Cornwall badger vaccination project – why the secrecy and confusion?

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On 30th July, Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Green received a reply to her written Parliamentary Question:

“To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the paper by Torgerson and others published in the Royal Society Open Journal on 11 June claiming that other studies of badger culls contain methodological weaknesses; and what plans they have, if any, to ensure that the Cornwall Badger Vaccination Pilot has a peer-reviewed protocol before any work can continue.”

The reply from Sue Hayman was as follows:

“Work has started on a comprehensive new bovine TB strategy for England, to continue to drive down disease rates to save cattle and farmers’ livelihoods and end the badger cull by the end of this Parliament.
The evidence surrounding bovine TB control, including recent studies such as the paper by Torgerson, is being independently reviewed by a panel of experts led by Professor Sir Charles Godfray, which the Government has reconvened.
Unlike previous badger culling studies, the Cornwall Badger Project is focused on testing different methods of delivering badger vaccination, rather than evaluating the impact on bovine TB in cattle. The project is being delivered by the NFU in partnership with the Zoological Society of London, who have a track record of publishing peer-reviewed research on the subject of badger vaccination. The project will continue to be regularly reviewed by Defra as it progresses.”


The following day July 31st, an article appeared in The Guardian newspaper entitled “Farmers and scientists join forces in Cornwall to vaccinate badgers against TB”. The article quotes one of the researchers involved  as saying:

“By working together to compare different approaches, we can develop a shared understanding of the evidence and use it to identify TB control solutions which are effective and sustainable.”

And it quotes a farmer as saying:

“What we hope to ultimately get out of [the project] is whether [badger vaccination] affects the cattle levels of TB – that remains to be seen, but I think it’s well worth doing.”

So Sue Hayman is telling us that “the Cornwall Badger Project is focused on testing different methods of delivering badger vaccination, rather than evaluating the impact on bovine TB in cattle”. Meanwhile, the researcher and farmer participant infer that the results will give an insight into the control of bovine TB in cattle because it seems they think or have been told that disease benefit in cattle is ‘likely’?  This approach is highly questionable. The Government statement implies that three or four years down the road, we will still have no evidence of whether badger vaccination effects TB in cattle one jot.

Importantly, the PQ asked if any analytical  protocol for the research and subsequent analysis would be published before the work starts to avoid a repeat of the problems of the Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT) (see here). But this was not answered.

The Guardian article states:

“The project will assess three vaccination approaches to determine which works best: annual vaccination over four years, vaccination every other year or reactive vaccination based on TB infection on farms.”

But this is a three year project? Is ‘working best’ just a reference to a rough idea of TB prevalence change in badgers using a difficult test ?

The NFU said previously in their January project announcement and in defiance of Government policy: 

“The NFU is clear that badger vaccination cannot be used as a direct alternative to culling and evidence is needed to give the NFU and wider farming industry the confidence that badger vaccination has any effect in reducing bTB in cattle, before proving its ability for delivery at the necessary scale, cost-effectively.” 

So in summary, NFU are being given around £1.3 MN to see if farmers in some apparently badger-friendly areas of Cornwall can vaccinate badgers with a bit of training, and Sue Hayman says, quite rightly, that it will shed no light on whether vaccination is of any value in controlling bTB in cattle. In contradiction, the researcher quoted suggests the work will identify TB control solutions which are effective and sustainable. So why, in the midst of an expensive damaging disease crisis are the NFU being set up to spend public money on something that cannot deliver their stated needs? Do ordinary farmers in Cornwall know this? – apparently not according to what those involved are saying.  

In any case the public, or at least independent specialists, should have access to the project design and the analytical protocol before work starts, whatever it is actually doing. For example if there are three treatment areas, will there be treatment ‘control’ areas and what proportion of badgers will be vaccinated, and what are the expected sample sizes?

Of course since the publication of Torgerson et al. papers (2024 & 2025), there is no sound scientific basis to continue with any badger culling or vaccination for bTB control. The RBCT did not show any benefit from badger culling, so any benefit from badger vaccination is unlikely. Cattle measures alone on the other hand, are proven to be effective. Are public funds being frittered again at a time when decisive action to protect badgers, cows and farmers remains long overdue and overlooked?

Vacuous  vaccination?

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Badger blame folly continues undercover

Have you noticed how quiet the NFU have become over badger culling since Labour came to power?  Why could this be?

Steve Reed & badger

Badger Politics

In 2024 there was an agreement between the NFU and Labour not to make an issue of badger culling during a general election year. This was on the basis that Labour would ‘honour’ existing licences if they came into power – thinking that might be after the 2024 cull was over. But the election was called early by PM Rishi Sunak, and the surge in the Reform party popularity split the Tory vote and resulted in a Labour landslide. Labour’s undertakings meant they would go on to kill around 17,000 badgers in 2024.

Intensive culling programmes get go-ahead to continue to give ‘clarity’ to farmers

The first news from the new Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Steve Reed in 2024 was confirmation of the agreement with NFU that the current  badger culling programmes set to end in January 2026 would continue until then to give the farmers ‘clarity’. This decision went against advice from Natural England, who preferred the introduction of badger vaccination to seek a disease control benefit. But this advice was itself flawed, with growing evidence that there is unlikely to be any disease benefit from culling, and benefit from vaccination is entirely speculative. Natural England simply failed to properly consider evidence that  badger culling has no likely benefit, and simply cherry-picked the evidence they wanted to get past the task. ‘Freedom of Information’ now shows us that they also relied on unchecked manuscripts, claiming naively that badger culling had robust effects.

The death of targeted culling?

Around six weeks after getting into office, Labour moved to scrap the NFU/Defra pre-election ambition to get mass (targeted) culling going (along the lines of LRA hotspot culling) in the HRA and Edge Areas. This targeted culling, developed under Rishi Sunak’s tenure as PM, was in defiance of the 2020 ‘Next Steps’ Boris/Carrie Johnson/Zac Goldsmith policy which was to phase out badger culling. Phase it out “other than in exceptional circumstances”, that is. This caveat was the toe-hold for future culling that pro-cull interests in the civil service managed to keep on the job-sheet, to fight back with, now that Environment Secretary George Eustice had been overruled.

But a new Low-Risk Area cull was then given the go-ahead

Under strong NFU pressure, Labour still gave in to a new Low Risk Area cull in Cumbria. Was this an attempt to appease their industry masters by keeping new culling going, aware of  the long planned unpopular Farm Inheritance Tax news that was  about to be released? Did Labour use badger culling to indulge the farmers, in an attempt to distract from the freight train coming?

New Minister – new policy? Or just more of the same DEFRA dogma?

Excerpt from the Labour Manifesto, 2024

The problem for DEFRA  was how to balance Labour’s manifesto position that culling is ‘ineffective’, with the claims made by the Conservative Government politicians and their usual external contractors, of badger culling ‘working’; see the Downs et al 2019 and Birch et al 2024 papers. These publications have a pick-and-mix of confirmation bias, repeat of previous flawed analytical methods, stretched arguments, unevidenced speculation, confused presentation, key omissions and complex caveats. Of course many of the Government scientists who produced science that has facilitated badger culling for so many years are still in post. So how do they do a volte-face, and suddenly disagree with their own back catalogue of dubious science? Nobody likes to be wrong, and nobody is owning up to it so far. (see here for latest science update).

The Godfray Review

Another review of bovine TB control science (published since 2018) was commissioned secretly in 2024, and announced publicly in early 2025. The ‘Godfray’ review panel  is soon to deliver its report, but it is hopelessly stacked with vested interest. Some panel members have a long history in badger cull science, with Oxford University’s Charles Godfray, together with James Wood from Cambridge University, publishing a re-statement in 2013 (of now impugned conclusions), which was needed to greenlight badger culling. Surely the most positive spin that the review can come up with is that Government post-2013 cull outcome research is inconclusive? Pro-cull cheer-leader James Wood said as much recently on Farming Today. But he couldn’t resist repeating his long held personal view that badger culling helps TB control.

The Westminster Hall Debate – waiting for a date

A large number of pro-badger killing MP’s were purged by the general election. It was almost as if their support of badger culling was proportional to the rejection of them by the voting electorate – dozens of them. So no longer will Richard Drax, Bill Wiggins, Robert Goodwill, Steve Double and many others  be able to drivel on at Westminster Hall with anecdotal nonsense. Might the next one, resulting from the Protect the Wild petition, be fact-based perhaps? A date is yet to be allocated.

Back to the NFU

NFU get vaccination contract

So back to the question – why have the NFU been so quiet?  Well perhaps they still hope to be granted their wish to keep killing badgers. DEFRA has now funded a badger vaccination project in Cornwall. The NFU have been awarded the contract to undertake the work, working with the Institute of Zoology.

The new  £1.4 Million project hopes to train farmers to swap bullets for syringes (think banned RSPCA poster) in a so-far rather loosely described project to vaccinate badgers in the county for three years (2026-28) and compare it with somewhere else – either unvaccinated areas in the county or elsewhere. Details at present  are scant, but have been requested. Pre-experiment plans are vital for the delivery of useful results in a verifiable way and should be open to scrutiny, especially those concerning statistical approach.

Vaccinate or Exterminate. Will DEFRA’s new approach ignite further controversy?

But why would the NFU take the money to do something they are supposed to be inherently against, according to farm research (see here)? The reason could be, either with or without DEFRA Minister Zeichner’s permission, that NFU have been preparing ‘under the radar’ with Defra/APHA to head towards ‘Test Vaccinate Remove’  (TVR ) – where farmers learn to trap badgers, test with a dubious trap-side DPP test (see here) that in Wales was a disaster (see here), and cull the badgers that test-positive.

Is this the dirty secret about badgers that is keeping the NFU quiet?

Perhaps Godfray and his panel of not-very-impartial reviewers, (see here) who  have been asked to lean towards Labour’s preference for non-lethal badger intervention options, would be expected to leave the door ever so slightly ajar, hence open to TVR, simply by saying that badgers remain a TB risk to cattle.

This would satisfy the Defra/Civil Service ambition of bringing one single approach to disease control to three UK countries; Wales (possible new Reform/Welsh Nationalist government pro-cull wish in 2026), NI (UFU currently frothing at the mouth to cull) and England.  This may be the fantasy result for Defra, but it would be the grotesque, disastrous result of using selective and plain-wrong science. It would be an extension of the UKs failure to tackle livestock disease effectively over the last 25 years (see National Audit Commision report here).

Will the NGO’s want to help the NFU vaccinate badgers?

It is interesting to note that the NGO’s are becoming less keen on badger vaccination, including the Wildlife Trust and Badger Trust. Partly because most vaccination teams have been frozen out of funding for this work that they have undertaken to protect badgers from bTB. Government has been aiming to capture and control the whereabouts of badger setts and badger vaccination for some time (see here) and it is handy for them if the NGOs stand aside or assist.  NGO’s do hold important badger sett information that Defra would be keen to get hold of for potential future culling – when the NFU have demonstrated that badger vaccination either doesn’t work or somehow isn’t enough – cover for another 5 years of ineffective cattle testing and compensation?

So there are a few possible reasons that the NFU are so quiet. It could of course be that they recognise that the failed cattle testing system with inadequate use of tuberculin and gamma testing, imposed by Defra, has destroyed farm interests for a generation while the food wholesalers continue to have uninterrupted supply. But they won’t stay quiet about that for ever will they? Why would they do that?

The 2025 ‘Torgerson’ scientific paper

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“The fall of the perturbation effect hypothesis”

Professor Paul Torgerson

The new scientific Comment paper by Paul Torgerson and colleagues was published on 11 June in Royal Society Open Science (RSOS)  (here), and is a comment on two 2024 re-evaluations of the Randomised Badger Culling Trial 1998-2005 (RBCT) statistics (here and here). These re-evaluations were, themselves, a rebuttal of the comprehensive re-evaluation by Professor Torgerson’s group earlier in 2024 (here) which was prompted by the heavily peer-reviewed published evidence in 2022 (see here) that industry-led post-2013 badger culling was having no effect on bTB cattle herd breakdowns. The latest RSOS Comment paper (and its notable peer-reviewer findings) is well timed to accompany the Government’s new general intention to end  badger culling by the end of this parliament (2029).

The current bovine tuberculosis (bTB) epidemic flared up in 2001 due to mismanagement of cattle distribution. Officially TB Free-Withdrawn cases (OTF-W) peaked in beef and dairy herds in 2015, starting to fall after annual testing from 2010 and the gradual tightening of TB controls in cattle. But Officially TB Free-Suspended cases (OTF-S), that are also indicators of new infection, have slowly risen. BTB remains embedded in herds in many counties, and is a costly and destructive force across much of England and Wales, and throughout Ireland.

This area of epidemiology has been a hugely controversial subject, largely due to RBCT findings in 2006 that suggested the European Badger Meles meles (a legally protected mammal) plays a highly significant role in bTB spread in cattle. Subsequent Governments have culled approaching 250,000 largely healthy badgers in England since 2013. The policy has been justified using the RBCT’s ‘perturbation effect’ hypothesis, where one specific analytical approach was used to claim that this hypothesis could explain beneficial and negative effects of mass badger culling. It was hugely uncertain and speculative, but treated as ‘established science’ and ‘irrefutable fact’ by those seeking to see badgers culled for all kinds of reasons.

The 2024 Torgerson re-evaluation, looked at the way in which the differences in the number of cattle herds in ten paired comparison areas of countryside in the RBCT trial were adjusted for, together with the varied duration of experimental study periods. Further, model selection used in the original analysis was examined. The task of assessing the suitability of  models from among the most likely candidates was undertaken, bearing in mind that the pre-experiment plan for data analysis was loose and open to interpretation – see Supplementary Material 1 of the Torgerson paper. In this part of the analysis it is the selection of the most appropriate model that is the most critical for verifiable results. More plausible models than that used in the original 2006 analysis (here) were readily apparent. The new study was able to demonstrate how these more plausible models show no effect of badger culling upon herd BTB breakdown rate.

Further, the team looked at how newer pathogenic evidence and interpretation, including better understanding of categories of TB-test reactor cattle, now more accurately informs decisions on what represents a new herd infection and herd risk status. The paper described the reality that using ‘all BTB breakdown’ data is by far the safest conclusion for policy application. And when ‘all data’ is used, there is no effect of culling over all models. APHA and Natural England still claim that they believe this is wrong, which enables them to carry on licensing badger culling. 

So whilst the original conclusion of the RBCT study reported that culling of badgers can make ‘no meaningful contribution’ to the control of bovine TB in cattle herds remains correct, the true reasons for this being the case are surprisingly different to those given in 2006. It is not, as originally suggested, because of positive effects (in cull zones) and negative effects (in neighbouring zones), but because there are no measurable effects to be found. The ‘perturbation effect hypothesis’ is a major casualty of the new analysis – if it exists, the RBCT found no evidence of it.

Whilst direct or indirect transmission between wildlife and cattle cannot be ruled out on rare occasions, it  is not present at the significant scale reported by the RBCT model choice and data selection. Wildlife infection should no longer be blamed for the inadequacies that are all but entirely due to poor disease management by Defra and APHA who dictate every move of the livestock industry.

All this is positive news for livestock, badgers and disease control. The 2020 policy direction to abandon lethal badger interventions is justified, with a renewed focus on cattle measures that are known to be effective. The ‘hidden reservoir’ of BTB is now sufficiently well understood for ‘new generation’ TB tests to deliver far better detection rates. If there was greater scope for their use (currently restricted), these would give a real opportunity to vets and farmers to work towards the bTB elimination rates last seen in the 1960s. The logical conclusion from these newly published findings is that since badger culling has no measurable disease control value, badger vaccination is very unlikely to either. Any badger vaccination field trials would be an expensive distraction, when it is proven cattle testing and movement measures that need to be implemented at scale to tackle the epidemic effectively.

Vet Times reports on new Torgerson analysis

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A new article in Vet Times reports on the Torgerson et al (2025) paper published in Royal Society Open Science last month, that has prompted calls to stop all badger culling immediately. The badger culling policy has, it says, relied on a ‘basic statistical oversight’.

The article picks up on comments by the new paper’s reviewer, Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland director Mark Brewer, who argued that “in such a contentious area as this, it is naive to imagine that a single analysis by a particular group of scientists should be seen as sufficient”.

In a noticeable first and potential change of direction, the article quotes Chief Veterinary Officer Christine Middlemiss as saying that Defra is “really looking to protect our key species through vaccination and progress that with badgers, as a key wildlife species, but cattle as well.”

You can read the article here.