Government badger cull policy has rested all but entirely on the RBCT analyses. It is the science that DEFRA has used to create policy and in court to defend their decisions to experiment with badger culling. The RBCT claimed badger culling can reduce bovine TB in cattle; very many subsequent studies are heavily derived from it.
Disease benefits that have in recent years been ascribed to badger culling by civil servants and politicians are in reality, far more likely due to implementation of additional cattle measures that were put in place before or at the same time as culling. But Government scientists continue to infer that badger culling has caused a reduction in disease, simply because this is what was “predicted” by the results of the RBCT. its classic confirmation bias.
Below is a chronology of some key RBCT publications.
Inexplicably, the Natural England rationale for licensing the supplementary badger culls in 2025 year did not take the Torgerson et al 2024 preprint into consideration. This is despite considering un-peer reviewed reports this year, and preprints (notably Mills et al 2024) last year.
So although the peer reviewer (Prof M. Brewer, Director of Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland) of Torgerson et al (2025) favours this new evaluation, which concludes that “The justification for lethal control of badgers to date appears to have been based upon basic statistical oversight.”, it was not considered in the cull licensing for 2025. The peer review comments for the new Torgerson et al. Comment paper are available from the online link, and are well worth reading in full.
The justification for badger culling has been shown to be wrong in so many ways. Badger culling must stop immediately, on the basis of scientific evidence.
In response to the new scientific paper published in Royal Society Open Science today, Natalie Bennett has re-iterated the Green Party’s call to bring an end to badger culling. She is quoted as saying:
“The Green Party has long said that the badger cull is cruel, ineffective in controlling TB in cattle, and unscientific, and here is a demonstration of particularly the last.”
“Policy should not be made, or continued, on the basis that ‘we must do something’, even if that something is known either to not work or be actively harmful. Yet that is the position the government is now in.”
“The science is clear that tackling biosecurity and testing in cattle is the only solution to this issue that is causing heartbreak and loss to so many farmers.”
“I repeat our calls for an immediate end to the killing of badgers in this terribly nature-depleted nation.”
The London based Royal Society have published analyses that show how key aspects of methodology of the Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT) published in Nature in 2006 were misdescribed and used implausible analytics. Original statistical appraisal that RBCT authors had claimed was too robust to require checking, was actually fallible, once clearly explained and tested.
The published Comment paper, addresses two scientific papers, also published in Royal Society Open Science in August 2024 by postdoctoral student Cathal Mills, supervised by Head of Department of Applied Statistics at Oxford University Professor Christl Donnelly, and Professor Rosie Woodroffe of the Institute of Zoology, (Mills et al I & II 2024). This work sought to defend the original analysis of the Randomised Badger Culling Trials (RBCT), (Donnelly et al 2006), which had been challenged by a full research paper published in Nature Scientific Reports in July 2024 (Torgerson et al 2024). A peer reviewer characterized one pivotal choice made in the two Mills et al. papers that tried to uphold the 2006 findings, as ‘naïve at best’.
Professor Paul Torgerson, Head of Epidemiology at the Zurich University Vet School, has led a team to undertake a detailed reanalysis of the original RBCT analysis. Papers derived from RBCT work have been used since 2013 by the Coalition, Conservative and now Labour Governments to justify badger culling. Labour however have called it ineffective, but without detailed explanation and have issued a new cull licence. Subsequent academic papers have relied heavily on the ‘ground zero’ Donnelly et al. 2006 publication to continue to claim that culling produces a disease benefit in cattle.
In Torgerson et al. (2024), and now also in the newly published and reaffirming Torgerson et al. (2025) “Comment” on the Mills et al (2024) papers, the most statistically and biologically plausible analytical options showed no evidence to support an effect of badger culling on bTB herd incidence. This is consistent with the 2022 analysis (Langton et al 2022) of part of the subsequent industry led badger culls in England (2013-2019), that was unable to detect any disease control benefit.
The “Comment“ also infers that the so-called “perturbation effect hypothesis” no longer holds convincing statistical support. This hypothesis first suggested in the 1970s was of badgers becoming frightened and disturbed (due to the catching and killing of them) consequently dispersing. Then directly or indirectly, badgers were alleged, to be responsible for multiplying the transmission of bTB to somehow cause half of TB cattle herd breakdowns. This mechanism was used to try to explain the claimed effect from the RBCT analysis.
The entrenched understanding of the role of badgers in bTB transmission to cattle over the last 20 years or so is further undermined and finally departs from any empirical support, sending a shockwave through beliefs that have become ingrained in farming, veterinary and Government thinking, where a high level of denial has already been in evidence since uncertainties were raised in 2019.
The implications of the new analyses are enormous, undoing extensive perceptions within multiple stakeholders that badger interventions are fundamental to any policy to control bTB in cattle. Whilst it clear that bTB introduced to wildlife from cattle is shared between wild mammals such as badgers, deer, rats and even domestic cats, exchange between wildlife and cattle has not been shown with sufficient precision in genetic studies to provide confidence. Infected wildlife may result simply from them being ‘spillover’ hosts, where infection dies out once disease is tackled in cattle. New cattle infections continue to occur due to poor testing sensitivity failing to identify disease, the incorrect designation of herds as ‘TB-Free’ when still infected, and continuous trading of infected calves and yearlings. The ongoing bTB crisis has cost the UK and Ireland an estimated £2 Billion in public payouts and lost productivity over the last 20 years alone, including over £1 Billion in England and Wales since 2013.
In 2024 the DEFRA Minister Daniel Zeichner invited Professor Sir Charles Godfray at Oxford University, to reconvene his 2018 review panel to consider the latest relevant scientific publications. Godfray, was involved in the statistical audit of the original RBCT analysis and in a 2013 report that appraised RBCT badger culling science, and a review in 2018 that recommended badger culling should continue. He has consistently endorsed RBCT statistics and badger culling.
The new paper and reviewer comments are available to read here.
Quotes from authors
Paul Torgerson, Professor of Veterinary Epidemiology at the Vetsuisse Faculty of the University of Zürich who has led the independent group said:
“The significance of our findings extends to several dozen papers written since 2006 that use the 2006 findings to build a theoretical case that badger interventions are a necessary part of bovine TB control in cattle, when they are not. Much work is now needed to highlight this issue by corrections, retractions and other measures to ensure students and practitioners are no longer misled. Bovine TB control must focus on inadequate TB testing and movement control of cattle where the problems are now well known.”
Tom Langton a nature conservation consultant within the independent group who has studied bovine TB control, has coordinated technical and legal scrutiny over badger culling since 2016. He said:
“The Government challenge to prevent further £1 billion spend over the next decade on more inadequate disease control will require fresh thinking and approaches. The Labour Government has rightly labelled badger culling as ‘ineffective’ and must surely now immediately cancel all badger culling licences while an inquiry is launched, as should Government in the Republic of Ireland, where thousands of mostly healthy badgers are also culled each year with no demonstrable reward. The failures of the TB testing system are now so well established it is unfathomable why prompt government action was not taken last year.”
In August 2024, 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, which will 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 (here, here and here) has been prohibited by Defra for at least five years, 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 in 2024 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. Leaked figures suggest that 10,769 mostly uninfected badger adults and cubs were killed in the 2024 supplementary, intensive and targeted culls to January 2025. 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, under the previous Conservative administration, 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. A general election and subsequent 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 (i.e. no targeted culling was implemented) 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.
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 did not just re-authorise existing licences, they are started new licences in new areas, this one in Cumbria in the Eden valley north and east of Penrith. This had a 100% cull objective, repeating the failed epi-cull of the immediately adjoining area, the subject of a report in 2023 (see here). This cull that was demonstrably the most ineffective cull of all, because badger killing began when cattle testing had cleared all herds in the area, beyond those chronically infected. Labour have revised their public presentation to say that all culling will finish by the end of this Parliament – by 2029.
Test, Vaccinate, Remove (TVR)?
The direction of travel of a recent trickle of papers published by government scientists suggests that the new Godfray review will switch from recommending badger vaccination experiments to TVR experiments, possibly while cranking up ‘hotspot’ culling (which is targeted culling with a different name) to keep the ‘old science’ going. Will there be, as in 2013, a ghastly pilot of the new policy that would provide DEFRA with what they need to keep the NFU and others happy with continued culling?
How did we get here?
The intensive badger culls have been in progress since the policy began in 2013, bringing the official total killed to May 2025, to around 240,000. 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, using unrealistic (and unexplained) extrapolation.
The February 2024 paper by Defra staff (Birch et al.) was being used to justify further culling in the March 2024 consultation, and falsely claimed that the culling programme thus far had 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 muddles cause and effect. Authors of Birch twice 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. Birch et al also incorrectly under-reported the use of additional Gamma testing, which is a likely significant cause of disease decline. In truth, Birch 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 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 epidemiological information and investigation was lacking. Following publication of the report ‘A bovine TB policy conundrum in 2023‘ in April 2023, 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 unscientific and unethical veterinary practice.
Why are APHA not checking back 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 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. Published in Nature Scientific Reports in July 2024, 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).
Rather than pushing for Test, Vaccinate & Remove (TVR) as seems to be the DEFRA & APHA current direction of travel (together with continued 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.
Back in the day, and well before their ‘not-so-sensible after all’ 2001 merger with the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR), the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, (MAFF), were influential in deciding what government should do about badgers.
Badgers had being shown to be carriers of bTB, and capable of infecting cows, at least when locked in a small shed together with them for months. In their contribution to the 1980 Government review, (and tucked away in a long appendix), MAFF made significant claims that went wildly against the established veterinary thinking of previous decades. Previous established understandings had led to the effective elimination of the disease across most of Britain, no less.
In the video linked below, ecological consultant Tom Langton shows how bad epidemiology altered the course of bTB control, sending scientists, civil servants, politicians, farmers and vets floundering in the wrong scientific direction for over four decades.
npj Climate Action is an open-access, online journal published by Nature Portfolio. It focuses on research and action related to mitigating the hazardous effects of global climate change. It aims to bridge the gap between scientific research and practical climate action, informing policies at both local and global levels.
A paper entitled “The activism responsibility of climate scientists and the value of science-based activism” (Anguelovski et al (2025)) has recently been published in npj Climate Action. The arguments for the participation of scientists as so-called activists in the development and evolution of government policy are eloquently expressed and hard to disagree with. And these arguments transfer from climate science to many other areas of important environmental science, not least badger culling.
Quoting from this new paper, it is surely sensible that “scientists have the right and responsibility to engage in activism” because “their expertise and ethical responsibility position them well to change policy”. This has not been the case thus far with the science of badger culling, where independent peer-reviewed science has been dismissed by government scientists; the term ‘anti-cull activists’ has been used to try to slur individual scientists (and the peer-reviewers of their publications) and undermine the veracity of work that does not concur with the established Government policy view (see the un-peer reviewed letter in Vet Record, DEFRA press release & CVO blog). No peer-reviewed science has been published since to justify the criticisms made in these pieces. Gideon Henderson has since left his post as Chief Scientific Advisor for DEFRA without commenting further on the matter or substantiating his intervention. Chief Veterinary Officer Christine Middlemiss remains in post.
How refreshing to read the recommendation the “..broader societal role scientists can play should be recognized and respected”. This has certainly not been the case with Government funded badger cull science, where there has been no inclusion of published scientists whose conclusions upset decades of Government funded work. Not only has there been inadequate dialogue, but the only route to release of critical data and policy rationale has been through Freedom of Information requests or grueling legal engagement.
Badger Crowd is also happy to endorse the “call for the support of activists who engage with researchers in pursuit of evidence-based action.” As the paper’s abstract concludes, “Mutually supportive relations between science and civic groups will make science more horizontal, inclusive, and thus legitimate and impactful in the eyes of policymakers and society at large.”
Anguelovski et al (2025) includes a useful reminder of some important historical examples of scientific activists; “Think of Darwin’s debates with religious authorities, Snow’s work on cholera, or Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Entire branches of science (medicine, conservation biology) are defined by their activist agenda”.
So, we will look forward to future involvement of allbovine TBactivist scientists in the debate about the efficacy of badger culling and the direction of bovine TB policy. They have an important contribution to make. And it should have happened many years ago.
If you, as a member of the public, activist or scientist, support challenging the flawed science behind the badger cull and want to see 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”:
If you google “Is the Badger Cull Working?”, you get the following Artificial Intelligence (AI) overview:
“The badger cull, designed to reduce bovine TB in cattle, has faced significant debate and controversy, with evidence suggesting it has not been demonstrably effective in reducing disease rates.”
AI cannot always be relied on for accuracy or its ability to summarize complex science. But you can’t argue with this one sentence.
Natural England should ‘Stop the Culls’. Instead, this is what they will almost certainly do; they will announce that around 15,000 badgers were shot in 2024, and this will be deemed a ‘success’ due to their view of ‘anticipated’ benefit’ – as opposed to ‘measured benefit’. Then they will sign off licences to kill off another 7,000 across 16 counties of England.
They have no ability to say whether what they have done has had any effect on bTB in cattle and they resist scrutiny of uncertainties around this. They have undertaken no serious efforts to monitor ecological impacts of removing badgers. It has to be asked whether such actions are lawful? But the courts say the Government is in charge and can use its chosen ‘experts’ for advice. What chance do badgers have against such blinkered, cruel thinking and an uncaring administration?
How the badger culls will drag on in 2025………….
Note: Area 44 Avon was not approved to continue in 2024.
If you support challenging the flawed science behind the badger cull and a parliamentary debate on the issue, please sign the Protect The Wild petition linked below calling to “End the Badger cull and adopt other approaches to bovine TB control”:
Labour took over Government in July 2024, with a manifesto that announced an end to “ineffective” badger culling. But since then there has been little change in the perpetual failings of Government response to the scientific and policy issues.
Culling of largely healthy badger adults and cubs has continued in the High Risk Area of England and beyond; figures for the numbers killed under Labour rule in 2024 will be released in May and are likely to be around 15,000. Shamefully, a new area in Cumbria,in the Low Risk Area was licensed for 100% targeted culling, again with very few active bTB breakdowns, all of which were caused by infected cattle movements. A few hundred badgers will have been needlessly shot there so that Defra, APHA and Natural England can show the NFU that they are keeping the cull plates spinning.
The old Government plans for mass “targeted culling” across the UK which were at the consultation stage during the General Election were rightly scrapped, but they have been replaced by a stated aim to bring forward badger vaccination. Defra and APHA just won’t accept that badgers are not a significant part of the bovine TB problem in England, and move on to cattle based measures that would rapidly bring the disease under control. This is despite published peer-reviewed science that clearly shows how badger culling is based on uncertain science and that it cannot be shown to have reduced bTB in cattle.
Now a trickle of papers are being published that seem to reveal the policy direction DEFRA is pushing for adoption for England, and hence Wales and Northern Ireland. APHA staff seem to be scrupulously sticking to civil service tribal behaviours, ignoring published science that they do not like, continuing to try to frame “association” as “cause and effect”, and championing confirmation bias. With “Tuberculosis in found dead badgers at the edge of the expanding bovine tuberculosis epidemic”, the text “highlights the co-incidence of infection in badgers and cattle in parts of the southern edge area consistent with localised clustering of infection in both species.” But this is not surprising, and provides no insight into the direction of infection. Yet the farming press immediately put a spin on the work, saying it “provides new insight into the potential role of badgers in the transmission of TB, particularly in areas where the disease has not yet fully taken hold in cattle populations”. They continue “Badgers have long been implicated in the spread of TB to cattle, and this study suggests that they continue to play a role in areas near the edge of the disease’s established range.” Written to keep the badger blame flame alive.
Next we get “Can badger vaccination contribute to bovine TB control? A narrative review of the evidence”. Here we get the following bold statement in the abstract: “Modelling studies evaluating different strategies for controlling TB in badgers predict that badger vaccination will reduce TB prevalence in badger populations and lead to corresponding reductions in cattle herd disease incidence.” There may be some evidence that badger vaccination will reduce bTB prevalence in badgers, but there is no certainty that this will lead to corresponding reductions in cattle herd disease incidence. Yet Government scientists continue to try to groom the science world and the public into believing their partial interpretations of the science, and then fit them to their chosen policies. Policy driven evidence once again.
And a recently posted pre-print “Bovine tuberculosis model validation against a field study of badger vaccination with selective culling” introduces a sinister prospect. If you thought all forms of targeted culling were off the table, think again. Test, and Vaccinate or Remove (TVR) is now being discussed once more. (The TVR approach involves capturing live badgers, testing them for TB with an unreliable test, vaccinating those that test negative to the disease and killing those that test positive). Using data from the Irish ‘Four areas’ culling trials of the 1990’s and data from the Randomised Badger Culling Trials (RBCT), this paper is a claim for the efficacy of modelling in predicting culling outcomes. But the problems of such modelling remain the same; the quality of the data, the size of the samples, the appropriateness of the models used. And the problems of separating the effects of different variables also remain, as we have seen with the clumsy Government interpretation of APHA’s ‘Birch’ paper in 2024, brought out (unsuccessfully) to try to railroad ‘targeted’ culling through. Garbage in, garbage out.
None of the above publications or pre-prints have cited publications that demonstrate that the efficacy of badger culling is not evidenced. Meanwhile, the latest Government initiated review of ‘new’ science since 2018 continues in private, and is due to report by the end of June when it will be given to the hapless BTB Partnership. Commissioned by the government last year, most of the review panel scientist appointees have been closely associated or involved in Government science for many years, and have provided or supported the rationale on which intensive badger culling has been pursued since 2013. They rubber stamped it again at the last review. Can we expect an objective conclusion this time?
Government produced science on badgers and bovine TB within the UK is now completely lacking impartiality; it is unbalanced and mired in confirmation bias. Just read the first line of this Abstract (DAERA funded) in “Landscape as a Shared Space for Badgers and Cattle: Insights Into Indirect Contact and Bovine Tuberculosis Transmission Risk”; this paper is inference without evidence. Papers on badger vaccination and trap-side testing are becoming speculative narratives seeking to justify the past papers that the authors have been writing, sometimes for decades, believing that the ‘ground zero’ analyses and hypotheses were sound. With nowhere to go, they just keep digging. And dangerously claiming that TVR could help reduce bTB in cattle, even if half of the badgers killed are healthy false positives. It is more of the same old guesswork in play.
The direction of travel of this recent trickle of papers by government scientists suggests that the new Godfray review will switch from recommending badger vaccination experiments to TVR experiments, while cranking up ‘hotspot’ culling (which is targeted culling with a different name) to keep the ‘old science’ going. Presumably, as in 2013, there will be a ghastly pilot of the new policy that would provide DEFRA with what they need to keep the NFU and others happy with continued culling. Meanwhile, the public will continue to foot the bill for dirty cattle trading. And yet again Natural England get a stay of execution, safe from the recently announced review of ‘quangos for the chop’ by retaining their badger cull licensing function.
If Government, and Ministers during their short tenures, ever gets serious about making England TB free, they need to look to cattle-based solutions. The long held historic fixation with badgers is not borne out by credible science. They need to address cattle measures head on, rather than continuing to pretend they couldn’t rapidly stop bTB in its tracks if they wanted to, and save all those involved from massive cost, needless destruction and prolonged misery. Why won’t they do that?
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”:
Bovine TB has been misunderstood for 50 years. All because new interpretations by MAFF in 1980 sent industry and scientists in the wrong direction. A new short report here now tells the story of how this came about.
Studies of bovine TB in cattle carried out in the early twentieth century and reviewed by veterinarian John Francis in 1947 described the disease as largely respiratory. That is, beyond infected milk, bTB is transmitted mostly through exhalation and inhalation of bacteria on fine aerosol droplets and by exchange of saliva. This understanding remained dominant until the 1970’s, and the policy to get on top of the disease was based on this science – and was effective in Britain especially during the 1960s.
As bTB dissipated, it was partly the discovery of bTB in a dead badger in 1971 that led to a review of the science in 1979. A transmission experiment had suggested that when kept together in close confinement, badgers could pass bTB to calves. The review by Lord Zuckerman in 1980 was informed by reports written by a local MAFF veterinary inspector who was sure he had found the important new source of transmission, and claimed that badgers were entirely to blame for the slowing decline of the disease in the west of England.
The new view was that early-stage bTB lesions in cattle (non-visible and small) did not shed sufficient bacilli to be a risk. This was contrary to the generally accepted view that prior to slaughter, un-lesioned (nonvisible lesion) SICCT reactors can have active TB infection, and are very capable of infecting. The John Gallagher (MAFF vet) 1980 view was that TB cattle were only infectious where ‘open’, well developed lesions were found at postmortem, and that this was a rare occurrence.
Thus, the prevailing MAFF rule of thumb that came to dominate in the 1980s appears to have been that even relatively young adult cattle had a kind of ‘safe’ latency, similar to that found in TB in adult humans, via walled-off lesions or granulomas. Only around 10% of cattle infections were considered to come from other cattle, and that was via the oral ingestion route he thought. This was a huge change from the previous view that 90% of infections were respiratory and cattle-to-cattle in origin, with 10% from ingestion of faeces / infected milk.
Where did the new theory believe that the other 90% of bTB was coming from? Figure 1 below is a diagram from the 1980 Government Review of what was then labelled ‘Badger TB’. MAFFs’ position became that badgers were responsible for 90%+ of cattle herd breakdowns.
Figure 1. Graphic from Zuckerman Review 1980
TB testing in cattle was subsequently relaxed in the 1980s, whereupon the decline of bTB in cattle stabilized, then began to slowly increase again, mid-decade. As it increased in the 1990s, concern about the growing disease problem resulted in a new review in 1997, led by Prof John Krebs at Oxford University. And the Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT) followed from 1998 – 2005 to confirm the MAFF thinking that badgers were causing the new bTB epidemic.
The prevailing MAFF view, right up to the point after 2000 when it merged into DEFRA, was that badgers were;
“well adapted as the primary host of bovine tuberculosis in parts of Britain and much of Ireland”.
The attribution of infection to an external vector, principally badger, was based upon an association of high badger density with remaining breakdown areas. It is illustrated in the 1980 review (Figure 1 above), where cattle to cattle infection was regarded as a ‘remote’ possibility’. It’s hard to believe that this is what people thought back then.
Older MAFF vets maintained this position until as recently as 2019:
“Cattle are simply sentinels for the ever-increasing and widespread infection in badgers. They [cattle] are not the problem per se since the disease does not readily transmit horizontally in cattle until it becomes advanced and the animals are in close confinement.”
“Of those [cattle] reactors to the tuberculin test showing visible lesions, the great majority are in the early stages of infection and thus likely to be non infectious.”
The Government-funded ‘TB hub’ launched in 2015, promoted as the ‘go-to’ place for British beef and dairy farmers to find practical advice on dealing with bovine TB on their farm states on its microbiology page:
“Mycobacteria are unusual amongst bacteria in their robustness, resilience and slow growth characteristics, and the chronic and insidious nature of the diseases that they cause. M. bovis is a facultative intracellular ‘parasite’, meaning that it can survive and thrive inside the host’s macrophages (cells of the immune system that are meant to engulf and destroy the invading bacteria). It has many adaptations to intracellular life and may become quiescent (dormant) or divide very slowly, which enhances its survival. It has a tendency to become walled off in granulomas (small nodules of chronic inflammation) in the tissues.”
The problem with this statement is that it is vague about the timing and stability of ‘walling-off’ in cattle, whether it actually happens in stock slaughtered at a young age or older and how this may contribute to the spread of disease. In reality, the understanding of the infectiousness of lesions at different stages has not changed significantly within the science community. The veterinary research publications, and in particular advances in histopathology and immunology, widely confirm that early-stage micro and small lesions in cattle release bacilli and are infectious. Those with infected lymph glands almost always have small lung lesions that may be impossible or hard to see during standard meat inspection or even post mortem.
This dichotomy of views has had an enormous impact on disease policy making, because it is the old MAFF view (that informed the RBCT), that is still underpinning the current DEFRA / APHA view that Officially TB Free Suspended (OTF-S) herds present less infection risk than Officially TB Free Withdrawn herds (OTF-W). In reality, they are likely to have similar disease risk status, even if the number of cases recorded with visible lesions has fallen.
As the number of necropsy (post mortem / meat inspection) cases with visible lesions diminishes even further, the fact that the bTB epidemic can be heavily driven by cows with non-visible and small lesions becomes clearer to the epidemiologist. Evidence is now indicating that cattle-to-cattle infection is caused by the non-visible microlesions, and small and often hard or impossible to detect stage I and II lesions.
This is why, for example, in the Republic of Ireland the rate of bTB decline slows (after decades of testing and inadequate control) and stops at the point where visible lesions become rarer, yet new infection keep developing. This is what is now happening in England. Its all down to 50 years of misunderstanding.
Progress on the control of bTB has been limited by misdescription of the epidemiology and pathology of bovine TB. This has caused confusion to non-specialists including Government administrators. It is important to note that bTB tests that can now identify live bacteria in blood, milk (and potentially faeces) offer a paradigm shift in clinical management of TB both in cattle and humans. Within years, not decades. The skin (SICCT) test, even at severe interpretation, is inconsistent in its ability to detect inactive infection that may begin or continue within days. Other tests used between SICCT tests may do this, and would lead to an advantage in detection and control opportunity.
This summary is based upon an independent report “Fifty years (1975-2025) of changing perspectives on bovine tuberculosis infection in cattle and badgers”, February 2025, (here) that has been sent to Defra in the hope of gaining recognition of this major historic issue.
Minister Daniel Zeichner must stop wasting taxpayers money and ruining farm livelihoods immediately
A new addendum update (here) to the dramatic 2023 expose (unheeded by the last Government), “A bovine tuberculosis policy conundrum in 2023” (here) has been released. It has been forwarded to Defra who say they are currently undertaking a review of scientific evidence since 2018. The results of the review will feed into their bovine TB strategy that they also say will be ‘refreshed’ at some point in the future – but when is not clear. It looks like there will be inadequate consultation (or no consultation) with contributing published scientists and nature conservationists.
Defra’s 2014 policy predicted that it would achieve ‘Officially TB Free’ status in the Low Risk Area (LRA) by 2025. Not only has this target not been met, but annual new herd incidents, incidence and prevalence have shown little change since 2014. Current data demonstrates little progress in LRA disease reduction over the past 11 years. Despite this, only weeks after Labour came into power, a new badger control cull licence was granted in Cumbria Area 73 within Hotspot 29. Throwing good money after bad, doing more useless, cruel badger killing and not seeing what is blindingly obvious – that the thinking and methods are completely wrong. So bad, for so long, and brutal to badgers, cows and farmers; the Defra ‘top team’ are wasting £Billions.
Cumbria: Area 32, Hotspot 21
In this hotspot, 100% badger culling and then vaccination of immigrants and survivors has been implemented since 2018. The graph and table below show bTB still persisting, with 4 ongoing incidents. To anyone who understands bTB control, this is an illustration of a complete failure to make progress; it shows that the earlier infections (orange) are persisting due to cattle movements/sales and inadequate testing approaches.
The current Cumbrian situation in general
The table below demonstrates how the county of Cumbria has shown no overall improvement in disease reduction since 2014. High numbers of OTF-S (Officially TB Free Suspended) herds remain, representing either new infections from traded cattle or recrudescence of disease that the SICCT and gamma tests have failed to identify.
Most incidents are disclosed by radial testing which is only instigated once an OTF-W incident is disclosed. This allows a 30 day delay, giving farms time to get rid of any ‘risky’ stock. The incidents disclosed by radial testing are at supposedly Officially Tb Free holdings undergoing 4-yearly testing. These farms could have been trading undetected diseased animals for up to 4 years or longer. When it was suggested to Defra (Personal comms. Ministerial Unit 6/11/2017) that annual testing in the LRA would be appropriate, the response stated: ‘Extending annual testing to all cattle herds in the LRA, which is on track to achieve TB free status by 2018, would significantly increase TB control costs for industry and the general taxpayer with only negligible disease control benefits.’ This approach has fallen on its face, with ‘TB Free’ status in Cumbria as far away as ever. The process has failed badly. The worst thing of all is that those in charge do not appear to recognise it, or are deliberately covering it up, which would be worse. Why on earth are farmers not taking action to stop this travesty? Will the Government now give farmers compensation for the impact of Defra’s flawed policy over the last ten years?
Lincolnshire Hotspot 23
This is the largest of all existing hotspots in the LRA, covering 1550km2. All herds within the hotspot have been subjected to annual whole herd testing since October 2020. Badger culling commenced in Area 54 (the LRA portion of HS23) in September 2020, the cull zone increasing to 122km2 in 2021. In 2023 a further 24km2 was added to the Lincolnshire portion of control area 54, despite it only having one herd (can you believe it?) in that whole area, and that herd was Officially TB Free.
‘
The data, illustrated above, shows minimal change in number of incidents in the Lincs Cull Area 45; badger culling has had no impact on TB levels in cattle. Enhanced cattle measures are likely to have reduced disease in cattle before badger culling began in 2020.
Low Risk Area in general
Throughout the UK, 45% cattle are traded by direct purchase between farms. The Low Risk Area covers approximately 50% of England, supporting a total of 18,268 herds. Cattle traded within the LRA between OTF farms are only subject to 4 yearly testing (with the exception of Lincolnshire), and do not require pre or post movement testing. Local trade is highly likely to increase the risk of spreading undetected disease within the LRA. The latest figures for which data are available show 637,239 movements within the LRA. As mentioned above, following an OTF-W incident, movement of cattle is permissible in a 30-day window before the introduction of radial testing. This hugely increases the risk of spreading disease to other areas.
Conclusions regarding Low Risk Area badger culling
Four-yearly testing with an imperfect test has resulted in self sustaining disease in cattle, enabling the development of hotspots in the LRA.
Budgetary constraints limit adequate cattle testing, which should be regular in and around breakdown herds and traded animals, including pre and post movement testing.
There is no evidence of disease benefit from the badger culling that has taken place from 2018 to September 2024 in the LRA.
Advice to Zeichner’s that LRA culling is necessary as a ‘last resort’ is both twisted and negligent.
Potential hotspots need to be identified earlier. At the moment they are not ‘declared’ without confirmation of a diseased badger, but this assumes badgers as having a role in the outbreak (without evidence), when official (Or unofficial) cattle movements are most obviously the cause.
BTB infection spreads between cattle herds in the LRA because:
Most LRA herds have only 4-yearly testing with an insufficiently sensitive test.
APHA allows trading of cattle in herds within a 3km radius of an OTF-W herd for 30 days after herd breakdown is notified, before radial testing is imposed. This practice provides opportunity for farmers to sell potentially high risk cattle.
APHA has made the mistake of assuming that a ‘new’ incident is an ‘index’ case, whereas the true source of disease is equally likely to be local farms with undetected disease. APHA is ineffectively ‘chasing’ disease, blaming badgers for infection while the bTB detection and control systems for cattle are wholly and quite obviously defective.
Daniel Zeichner must act immediately to stop what is going on in the LRA right now. There is not a day to lose. He must get a strong grip of the situation.
Please write to Daniel Zeichner and your MP asking for this crazy Low Risk Area badger culling madness to stop. Farmers are being badly treated and having their lives ruined by bad epidemiology from Defra. Its time to take a stand before the disease spreads even further in the north and east of England. Enough is enough.
The full ‘Addendum’ from which this summary is drawn is available here.
Prof. Sir Ian Boyd has a book out: ‘Science and Politics’ (politybooks.com, around £20). In it, he devotes several pages to describing the events that led up to the start of English badger culls. He talks of attempts to reign in early plans to get badger culling implemented, when a simple mess-up down to flawed population estimates led to the cull being postponed for a year. He then provides an ‘after the event’ critique of badger culling. Could this be a bit of re-writing of history with the benefit of hindsight, which has shown the inability of its proponents to demonstrate any benefit from the culls? There is no mention of the repeated failures to get a sufficiently good grasp of the veterinary science at the time, or the failure to call-out weak and questionable Government science at the heart of policy.
On February 15th Boyd was the guest of Sir Charles Godfray in Oxford for a book promotion, where bovine TB and badgers was the most mentioned topic, but the wider issue was politics distorting the scientific process in general. His main thrust appeared to be to point the finger at the politicians (‘charlatans’ he calls them in the book) and also at the Royal Society for not effectively educating the politicians. Boyd has clearly been frustrated by his seven-year experience as Defra chief scientist advisor (CSA), working for what he said might have been a ‘bad batch’ of Defra Ministers. But could he perhaps just be trying to hide his own wrong moves in plain sight?
Boyd’s cull?
If you had to pick one person whose name is synonymous with making the English badger culls happen on the ground during the last decade, it is arguably Ian Boyd, who was CSA for DEFRA from 2012-2019. Although the culls were not his concept, the job description required him to ensure that the policy was implemented, and that’s exactly what he did. He was put in post when the plans for two small pilot culls were underway, and he drove them through under Caroline Spelman and then Owen Paterson at DEFRA. Notably, at a National Farmers Union presentation in 2014, he gave a detailed PowerPoint presentation, where he said that there was no question – badgers had to be killed in order to deal effectively with bovine disease in their cattle. The effect of this was to cement the loathing of badgers for a generation in the livestock community, green-light vets to promote the badger blame game and make continued culling easier and illegal culling more likely.
By 2015 an Independent Expert Panel on badger culling was deftly bypassed. Emails released to the High Court would later show how Civil Servants were coached on how to get around legal issues to ensure the full badger cull roll-out from 2016.
The book talk entitled ‘Sir Ian Boyd in conversation with Sir Charles Godfray and Dame Helen Ghosh’ was held at the Oxford Martin building in central Oxford on February 15th. It put Ian Boyd amongst the scientists from the Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT) study that provided the original (2011) policy justification for badger culling. His book, basically an insiders guide to how politicians and scientific advisors rub along together, was live-screened and put online too, (here). The audience, described by Godfray as ‘prestigious’, included a range of government and ex-government employees who had seen Boyd in office. SirJohn Krebs (the main architect of the RBCT) was there alongside Christl Donnelly who did the controversial statistics of the RBCT, and the Emeritus Professor statistician Sir Bernard Silverman who has replaced Donnelly on the recently re-convened bovine TB review panel to be run by – your guessed it – Charles Godfray. Gideon Henderson who took over the role of CSA at DEFRA after Boyd, was also there. Helen Ghosh who was Director-General of the National Trust during the Badger Culls, made up the third member of the discussion panel, and the meeting took questions from a select few, with one or two further questions from the floor at the end.
Sir Charles Godfray, Sir Ian Boyd, Dame Helen Ghosh
The ‘scientifical political predicament’
Boyd’s short introduction made it plain that his book was aimed at getting a debate going, and that he was on a ‘good-guy’ mission. When he accepted the Chief Scientific Advisor role at DEFRA, he said that there had been no help to give him insight into what it would be like, and he had to learn very quickly. He felt he was on a learning curve the whole time, and after he had left he felt he had a duty to share his experiences. The first part of his book, his ‘scientifical political predicament’ (the tensions between scientists and politicians) led him to think that by getting involved with politics, scientists actually become ‘corrupted’. It was, he said, a problem that scientists have to try to solve to make the ‘politics factory’ (the people and space where Government happens) more effective. This included the institutions and structures around Government: NGO’s, industry, lobby groups, etc.
Part two of his book takes this further, and is called ‘Science Corrupted’. It was, he said, “really about trying to take the consequences of the processes that science is involved in, with respect to trying to get its voice heard, and understand what effect that has on science. So it’s the scientifical political predicament being played out”. As chair of the UK Research Integrity Office for the last six years, Boyd felt that a lot of the problems that sit with ‘science integrity’ occur at the politics factory interface, and are partly a result of, and partly driven by that process. Within this interface, Boyd described constructs, such as ‘evidence’, ‘what works’, ‘experts’ and ‘normative research’, and with lots of ‘confirmation bias’ sitting in the research. But he did not distinguish between research that was Government funded and done in-house, and that undertaken by independent bodies. He felt ‘confirmation bias’ occurs mostly in areas of post-normal science where there’s high uncertainty, high demand for results and a lot of controversy. He could have been talking about badger culling, (here). In the mid 1990’s, an impatient if not aggressive MAFF, tore up the veterinary research they did not like and demanded decisive action to cull badgers on behalf of cattle farmers.
‘Marking own homework’
The third part of his book, Boyd said, was called ‘taming the beast’, and about how it might be possible to fix the problem. This would be external to the existing ‘executive, legislative and Judiciary structures’ within Government that look in on how science is used, but were prone to ‘marking their own homework’ to some extent. Hence the continuous degradation of quality within the science being used would be avoided. He felt this would need a lot of hard work and determination, particularly from the scientific community and the leaders within the scientific community.
Helen Ghosh said she had been brought up in the old Department of the Environment, and her Secretaries of State in succession were Michael Heseltine, Tom King, Chris Patton and John Gummer, who had dealt with a lot of very tricky scientific issues. She didn’t recognize, or only recognized partially, Boyd’s characterisation. Boyd then praised Michael Gove (2017-2019) and said he (Boyd) had probably worked through a ‘bad batch’ of SoS’s. There had been good times, but not many, he said (note, before Gove they were Caroline Spelman, Owen Paterson, Liz Truss, and Andrea Leadsom). Ghosh mentioned badgers as being a problem that needed looking at on a ‘systemic basis’ (farming) rather than on a ‘topical basis’ (disease control). The ‘elephant in the room’ however was that if the disease control science been understood and implemented properly, the bovine TB epidemic could have been controlled much sooner. Boyd had failed to get his head around the veterinary science. Badgers and bovine TB were mentioned (although not in any detail) now and again, usually with a nervous smile from those present, many of whom still have considerable ‘skin in the game’.
Emergency ‘car crash’ response
Boyd’s view was that the leadership within the scientific community has to be much more attuned to ‘providing’. Making sure that science gets into the system at a much earlier stage than it tends to do at the moment. With it currently being a sort of emergency ‘car crash’ response a lot of the time. “And it really can’t be. It needs to be involved in designing the car and the road system and all the other things that go on.“ he added. Maybe it was a matter of having science advisors within political parties when coming up with their manifestos, he suggested.
Hindsight
Boyd was asked what he would have wanted to know when he walked into DEFRA’s offices in 2012 and what had he learned subsequently? Tellingly, he said that he would have preferred to have had a better view on how to deal with the badger culling situation. As mentioned above, Boyd’s book has what some might call selective reporting on this issue. As mentioned, he now frames himself as reticent towards badger culling. He said badger culling was something of a ‘wonderful example’ of the scientifical political predicament “and it’s still ongoing, you know it’s one of these things that just rolls on and on and on. And Gideon’s there, Gideon [Henderson] will be dealing with it right now, you know and John [Krebs] is here, and John dealt with it a lot.” It will go on and on and on. I don’t think there’s one solution to it. But I wish I’d known a lot more about the technical details when I walked in.” So do the badgers. And the cows and farmers. And the second ‘elephant in the room’ was Boyd (and previously in 2007 David King the Gvt. CSA), failing to check the statistics of badger culling in sufficient depth – King didn’t quite dig deep enough. If either of them had, they would have discovered how weak the association between badgers and bovine TB in cattle truly was. Krebs and Donnelly, sitting in the audience were not going to comment, having created the science that has been used and providing the endorsements politicians needed to set Boyd up to launch mass culls.
Hocus Pocus
Boyd went on to say that he worried about the extent to which there is compromise on the quality of scientific knowledge and argument. He referred to ‘indigenous knowledge’ in the biodiversity and environmental space, and how ‘indigenous peoples’ do know a lot about their environment and actually can bring an immense amount of information to bear on it. This was a bit obscure, but perhaps an oblique attempt at characterising those outside Government/University circles. Some information was ‘Hocus Pocus’ he said, “and we need to be able to identify the difference. We need to identify the good stuff from the bad stuff, or the reliable stuff from the unreliable stuff.” But that was his job wasn’t it?
Boyd bemoaned an ‘awful lot’ of evidence that sits around masquerading as high quality when it is actually quite low quality, but did not give examples. Boyd felt it was “really hard when in a position of having to advise a minister to use this evidence or that evidence, to know what is good and what is bad. “ Hmmm……
He continued “In the end you often have to make a judgment about, well, where does it come from, is it reliable source, those sorts of things, or you know, looking at looking at scientific paper and understanding, particularly the methods, are the other methods reliable or not. But even that actually sometimes masquerades as high quality when it’s actually quite low quality” Was that recognition that there has been an excessive reliance of work from sources with the right ‘pedigree’, without sufficient scrutiny?
This seemed to be as close to a confessional over badger culling as you could get. Boyd had little experience with veterinary science or cattle management in 2012 and as a ‘newbie’ had accepted, without enough scrutiny, the ‘Oxford’ science and submitted to the NFU brow-beating approach. Did he only realise, or accept his lack of understanding once he had left his post? Or has he held his confessional back for a reason or two.
So what was he doing by writing his book? Putting it out to all that he was a victim of a broken system? Hints of contrition? Was this just an elaborate ‘I got it wrong’ moment – a cathartic admission to purge his conscience and temper his legacy in an era that will be named as a defining one in UK environmental demise? The badger culls (and bovine TB muddle) need not ’roll on and on and on’. But Henderson, the new CSA, picked up the torch from Boyd and still no-one in Oxford wants to be the first to admit, or even mention the overwhelming uncertainty around their badger cull science. And, oh yes, Henderson is an Oxford man too…
Standards being stretched
Boyd’s thesis was that there is need for an official authority to be able to say ’this person is reliable’ and ‘this person isn’t reliable’. As President of the Royal Society of Biology, he said there was an authentication process (Chartered Biologist) that he personally does not use, but his view was that it should be used a lot more. There was scepticism from the audience. Gideon Henderson, who had suffered his own banana skin moment over badger culling data (here) wanted to know how corrupted he personally, and others had become? Presumably he had read Boyd’s previous writings on departmental tribalism (here). He wanted more detail, and to understand the nature of the corruption? Awkward.
Fiona Fox from the Science Media Centre made a remark that seemed more like a jibe, and with a distinct sarcastic edge than a question, possibly not understanding the way SMC gets used by civil servants; “…should academic scientists be expected to understand the policy process and understand what hell you are all clearly going through?” Unabashed, Boyd said that he felt ‘his standards’ were being stretched to some extent, and it had taken quite a lot of will, and self-discipline, to make sure that the basic scientific standards that he had been taught and had practiced for a very long time, were sustained and maintained. On corruption he said that people who get involved who are ‘not so wise’, could fall into a trap, which is basically to produce what he called ‘normative science’. Otherwise sometimes referred to as ‘policy-based science’. This is science that is helping to drive policy in a particular direction, and that he confirmed was what he meant by corruption. You could look at plenty of DEFRA agency constructs that fit this bill, but complying with civil service protocol, Boyd was not naming names of anyone still in post. Did Henderson really not realise he just might fall into the category of ‘unwise person’? The polite tensions in the room were palpable and it was not clear who was having dinner with whom afterwards. The wrinkled noses in the audience were those of the civil servants who know about the problems and observe a protocol not to boat-rock once they have left office . At least Boyd deserves credit for speaking out, albeit a bit too late.
Boyd continued “I don’t really mean individuals are making an overt decision to undermine science. I think that there is an invidious underlying process that draws them in, in order to be able to produce the results that somebody else wants rather than the results that actually really are needed. So that’s what I mean by it. So it’s not a personalized criticism.” He unconvincingly wriggled around the tribal fear culture. His ‘tribalism’ thesis was the way in which, as a whistle blower, he was balancing being seen to seek honest reform (within the den of thieves in Parliament) with risking the extensive ‘pissing off’ of those outside Westminster, who might still lean over and damage any future ambitions.
Prof Bernard Silverman (statistician and renounced curate now standing in for recused Christl Donnelly in the Godfray bovine TB review panel) was the Home Office’s Chief Scientific Advisor, overlapping with Boyd’s tenure (here). He asked about the role of the Royal Society, of which he is a Fellow. Boyd went into overdrive: “ The problem is the Royal Society actually. And I’m saying that in a public domain. Where you have the premier organization which has a capacity to really knock on the highest political door in the country. And it does need to do more of a coordinating activity. I have no doubt about that at all. But it doesn’t, and I’ll leave it at that. And I see you nodding.” Boyd thought that science would do well to look at some of the other professions and how they manage quality control within those professions; the scientific community could come up with a new system. But it needed to be valued by the policy profession.
Also present were Claire Moriarty, past permanent secretary in DEFRA during Boyd’s period of office, Claire Craig who was Director of the Government Office for Science, Jim Naismith, Head of The Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences (MPLS) division at Oxford University and John Beddington (London Zoo).
So what can be taken home from all of this? Basically, there is continuing pressure to produce results to fit a political agenda, mistakes are commonplace, they continue to be made, and the way to prevent the same thing from happening in the future is far from clear. Learned societies need to step-up, but acceptance of the problem is not universal. One thing is certain however; badgers, cows and the livestock industry lost out from the tangle of ‘Science and Politics’ before, during and after Boyd’s time in office, with 2014 targets now missed. Until those responsible take a good look at themselves and the mountain of hindsight now available, disgraceful waste will continue.
Government to review the last six years of bTB science for its ‘refreshed’ bovine TB strategy
On 30th January 2025, Defra issued Terms of Reference (here) for the ‘comprehensive new bovine TB review’, that was announced last August. This included details of a scientific panel which will be reviewing ‘new’ evidence that has become available since the last review was published in 2018.
How objective will the new review be?
The panel, that last month began reviewing new evidence for the ‘refreshed’ bovine TB strategy, is largely a reprise of those who undertook the last review back in 2018, with one exception. The panel will be chaired, as previously, by Professor Sir Charles Godfray, University of Oxford. He will be familiar with the current scientific views of those whose work has been used to maintain badger culling for the last 12 years. He was personally involved in the statistical audit of the Randomised Badger Culling Trials (RBCT) (1998 – 2005), and so is extremely close to the discussion of issues relating to questionable statistical approaches raised since the last review.
As before, Godfray will be supported by Professor Glyn Hewinson CBE of Aberystwyth University,Professor Michael Winter OBEUniversity of Exeter and Professor James WoodOBE of University of Cambridge. Wood has been vocal on TV and radio in his long-term support for Government publications that have suggested that badger culling might be working.
Professor Sir Bernard Silverman FRS, Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of OxfordUniversity has stepped in to replace Christl Donnelly, Professor of Applied Statistics at OxfordUniversity, who requested to be ‘recused’, for reasons that have not been stated, but may relate to recent scientific discussion over statistical elements of the RBCT. As one of the statistical auditors of the RBCT, Charles Godfray made recommendations in 2004 for tighter control of the data and analyses. Donnelly (et al.) statistics from the Randomised Badger Culling Trials (here) have been challenged in a new scientific paper by Torgerson et al. (here). And the debate has continued with Mills et al. (here) and (here) and Torgerson et al. (here). Whilst it is welcome that the ongoing dilemma will be reviewed, is the proper approach to have Oxford academics looking into an Oxford issue? Silverman describes himself on his CV as “Recognised as a world leader through ratings and awards. Wide experience within government, as chair or member of boards and committees and as a departmental chief scientific adviser, with specialist expertise in national security, modern slavery, official statistics, etc.”. Notably, he was on the panel of the Anderson Inquiry into the handling of the Foot and Mouth Epidemic in 2001, so has some experience of epidemiology.
The panel is expected to report their findings by the end June of 2025. Which is unfortunate for all the badgers that will be killed in the culls for which licences will be issued from June 1st (and September 1st) 2025. And for those that are victims of the escalating illegal culling that has been reported since ‘legal’ culling began.
One cannot help but think that if Labour had really wanted an objective review of the science around bovine TB and badger culling, they would have asked an independent set of scientists with less ‘skin in the game’, and perhaps more distanced from Oxford to undertake such a vital review. But once again it seems that it is largely the same set of academics who will be looking at the science in which they personally have a historical interest and potentially, future stake.
Defra have announced a £1.4 million badger vaccination project in Cornwall (here) suggesting that they may have already made their mind up on the science evidence; they are still treating badgers as a central issue in the control of bovine TB, despite the growing doubt. Yet they are still unable to provide any certainty that this is the case. Some are making robust claims about whole genome sequencing and what it can show, whilst others are modelling what they think might be happening using outdated assumptions and unproven associations. Meanwhile, the strongest evidence of inadequate control points to ineffective cattle testing being the crucial driver of bovine TB, and the solution must therefore lie with cattle controls.
Writing in a preamble to Badger Trust’s report ‘Tackling Bovine TB Together’, key badger ecologist and original 
Badger culls have previously been justified using the 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 epidemiological information and investigation was lacking. Following publication of the report ‘
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.
Commenting on this work, 
Back in the day, and well before their ‘not-so-sensible after all’ 2001 merger with the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR), the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, (MAFF), were influential in deciding what government should do about badgers.
A paper entitled “The activism responsibility of climate scientists and the value of science-based activism” (
Labour took over Government in July 2024, with a manifesto that announced an end to “ineffective” badger culling. But since then there has been little change in the perpetual failings of Government response to the scientific and policy issues.
Now a trickle of papers are being published that seem to reveal the policy direction DEFRA is pushing for adoption for England, and hence Wales and Northern Ireland. APHA staff seem to be scrupulously sticking to 
Bovine TB has been misunderstood for 50 years. All because new interpretations by MAFF in 1980 sent industry and scientists in the wrong direction. A new short report 
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Prof. Sir Ian Boyd has a book out: ‘Science and Politics’ (politybooks.com, around £20). In it, he devotes several pages to describing the events that led up to the start of English badger culls. He talks of attempts to reign in early plans to get badger culling implemented, when a simple mess-up down to flawed population estimates led to the cull being postponed for a year. He then provides an ‘after the event’ critique of badger culling. Could this be a bit of re-writing of history with the benefit of hindsight, which has shown the inability of its proponents to demonstrate any benefit from the culls? There is no mention of the repeated failures to get a sufficiently good grasp of the veterinary science at the time, or the failure to call-out weak and questionable Government science at the heart of policy. 
