A new analysis of Bovine TB data by the Animal and Plant Health Agency
“Difference in Differences analysis evaluates the effects of the Badger Control Policy on Bovine Tuberculosis in England”, by Colin P.D. Birch, Mayur Bakrania, Alison Prosser, Dan Brown, Susan M. Withenshaw, and Sara H. Downs.
This new analysis was posted as a pre-print on 6th September, on the ‘bioRXive server. You can view it here, although there is no access to the data to check it.
With the current programme of intensive badger culling winding down and coming to an end in 2025, up to a quarter of a million largely healthy badgers have now been killed. A new consultation on Defra’s intentions going forward under the 2020 “Next Steps policy is expected on or after 16th November. This new scientific paper has therefore been constructed at an important moment for the future direction of new bovine TB policy.
Both Therese Coffey (Secretary of State for Environment Food and Rural Affairs) and Lord Richard Benyon (Minister of State for Biosecurity, Marine and Rural Affairs) have said in public and in correspondence that badger culling should continue. Mark Spencer, (Minister of State for Food, Farming and Fisheries), has been using the Birch et al pre-print in parliament to claim large disease reductions from badger culling.
But how certain is the science behind these claims of disease reductions, and the stated intentions to carry on culling badgers?
In a 30 minute presentation available to view on YouTube here, Tom Langton talks through recent scientific pre-prints and publications that have analysed bovine TB in cattle herds and badger culling. Inevitably it is a technical presentation as the issues and the statistics involved are complex. But at this critical moment, as bTB policy is further revised, the controversy and uncertainty surrounding the science of bovine TB control needs even closer scrutiny.
Mr Justice Scoffield has quashed the NI government attempt to introduce controversial badger culling to Northern Ireland. Granting a judicial review brought by wildlife NGO’s funded by public donation, he said that consultees were not told enough – and in sufficiently clear terms – to enable them to make an intelligent response in the consultation exercise. The ruling concludes:
“The court was unimpressed by the respondent’s argument that disclosure of the business case would be too complicated or distracting for would-be consultees,”
“The fact that consultees did their best to respond on the basis of the more limited set of information which had been disclosed to them does not alter the respondent’s obligation to act fairly.”
In September 2022 year Legal Campaigners Wild Justice with Northern Ireland Badger Group (NIBG) were granted a High Court hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice in Belfast to challenge a cull of badgers in Northern Ireland HERE and HERE.
This legal claim contested a decision announced in March 2022 by the Minister for Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA), Edwin Poots, to allow killing of up to 4,000 badgers a year along the lines that DEFRA has been mass killing healthy badgers in England since 2013. The primary target was a decision of 24 March 2022 – set out in a statement made by the Minister that day and in a ‘Bovine Tuberculosis Strategy for Northern Ireland’ published by the Department shortly afterwards.
The claim brought was that consultation on the policy was incorrect and did not reach the requirements of lawful consultation. So, the decision to choose to control the badger population by allowing farmer-led groups to shoot free-roaming badgers was unlawful. The judge agreed.
The claim argued that Mr Poots’ decision is unlawful because he issued the Article 13 (power to destroy wildlife) order under the Diseases of Animals 1981 Order, but that he had not made sure that there was no reasonably practicable alternative way of dealing with bovine TB in Northern Ireland.
Finally, the consultation had proposed shooting badgers as a preferred option, based on a “business case” which was not disclosed as part of the consultation documents. Because of this the consultation was not a fair procedure as those consulted were prevented from having a properly informed response without seeing it. Comparisons with Test Vaccinate Remove (TVR) approaches had not been fairly made and an APHA position that firmly place TVR approaches “on a par with proactive culling with respect to impact on cattle herd breakdowns” was not properly addressed.
As previously reported, with the help of the Northern Ireland farming industry press, the farming sector was being hoodwinked into thinking that badger culling could somehow help them. DAERA had been busy promoting badger culling with ‘roadshows’ making exaggerated claims, disseminating misinformation and use other propaganda tricks to try to garner cooperation.
All the lessons from England including the question marks over government badger culling science, going back to the 1990s are relevant too. It was barely possible to believe, after year-on-year failure in England and the Republic of Ireland, that DAERA wished to ignore their inadequate cattle controls and cull badgers over the next 10 years across Northern Ireland.
Also proposed was an element of experimental badger vaccination after the mass slaughter, a policy that government appointed experts in England in 2018 said was an unproven approach to the control of bTB in cattle.
DAERA may decide to appeal the decision or more likely to reconsult with a business plan that they have held secret, and will no doubt need to rewrite. Will they now go down the TVR route or cull and TVR – this too would be a huge mistake? With the present absence of an Executive and sitting Assembly at Stormont, it is unlikely that authorisation could be given in any case, even with a new consulted plan. What DAERA should do is think again. Even more new science has emerged since the claim began, showing why badger culling policy science has gone so badly wrong and culling badgers in any way is unnecessary.
Huge congratulations to Northern Ireland Badger Group and Wild Justice for bringing the case and to all those supporting the case and opposing the flawed consultation process.
In March 2022, a peer-reviewed analysis of badger culling data was published in a top veterinary journal. It used all publicly available data. It showed no detectable difference in bovine TB breakdown between badger culled areas and unculled areas since 2013 (1). Now, after a government information black-out following their look at the data up to 2017, the Defra’s Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) have at long last posted a pre-print of their own creation looking at their secretly held data up to 2021.
It is not clear why it has taken so long to release this new analysis, a draft of which was presented at a conference in August 2022 (2).
Cynics might say there has been a search for obscure statistical methods to get the results needed to try to show a badger culling has not been a 100% failure. And of course, it supported the pro-cull rationale to hold data secret and keep quiet about any weakness in policy. This served to enable the 2022 and 2023 killings of over 50,000 mostly healthy badgers, planned and executed by the willing and obedient hands of Natural England (3).
The new pre-print, posted 6th September in ‘bioarchive’ (bioRxiv), is by six members of APHA staff. It tries to use an obscure technique: “Difference in Differences analysis evaluates the effects of the Badger Control Policy on Bovine Tuberculosis in England” to look at Bovine TB breakdown incidence (Withdrawn herds: OTFW) between 2009 and 2020 (4). There are many aspects of this new analysis which are problematic, but here are a few of the more obvious.
A new statistical method of analysis – ‘Difference in differences’ (DID)
This is the first time the DID approach has been used in badger cull analyses and it is simply inappropriate. DID compares the changes in outcomes over time between a population that is enrolled in a programme (a group subject to an intervention) and a population that is not (the control group).
The attempt here is to use the same areas in a ‘before and after’ way. There is no clearly defined control group, it is just the fragmented cull areas before they are licensed to cull. The 52 cull areas are surrounded by and influencing each other during a wide range of tightening testing interventions. They are, therefore, not adequately discrete in space and time, breaking a fundamental DID requirement. So not only is this (DID) an unorthodox approach, but it does not follow the basic rules of the unorthodox approach. It is looking a bit desperate already.
Notably, in the period 2016- 2020, pre-cull and cull areas closely juxta position. Pre-cull and cull cattle testing interventions of course influence changes in adjacent pre-cull and cull areas in an irregular and unpredictable manner, via the constant movement of cattle with different testing and control histories. It’s a mess, and surprising that this has been presented as an appropriate statistical method, considering the subject and the epidemiology involved.
Analysis does not distinguish between different causes of disease decline.
Does the analysis decisively link badger culling to decline in bovine TB in cattle? Not at all. Any possible effect of badger culling is confounded with the continuous multi-faceted and complex tightening of cattle testing that took place in an uneven manner over different and irregular time periods. Some of the very important bTB testing controls used, and the timing of their introduction, are incorrectly described and some of the most important ones are not even mentioned.
The Badger Culling Policy invention
There are places in the manuscript where a claim is made for a link to badger culling, ‘The effect of badger culling…’, but then later this is adjusted to ‘However, this data analysis cannot explicitly distinguish…….’ APHA have stated more than once in their recent epidemiology reports that the cattle breakdown data alone are insufficient to show an effect of culling.
Frankly there is no such thing as the ‘Badger Culling Policy’ (BCP) as framed by this report, beyond just killing badgers. It is an invention trying to characterize extensive cattle testing and movement control measures as just a part of the badger culling bolt-on, rolled out six years after testing control measures had been continuously tightened year on year. To pretend the extensive suite of testing and movement control measures is somehow a part of a whole is just a repeat of the ‘all tools in a box’ nonsense and it deceives. True, some of the more essential measures were increased from the first year of badger culling, but most of them were independent of it and ramped up gradually. So trying to pull them apart in a post-facto try-on will not impress the independent scientist, even if an obliging journal prints it, and industry and Defra promote it with their coterie of academic cheerleaders. Badger culling has just been a pointless distraction to cattle surveillance and control measures to address rampant cattle-to-cattle transmission.
So again, no, the analysis is not able to show causation by badger culling of any change in disease, and Defra and APHA’s judgement could be seen ill-judged by trying to convince anyone that this is credible. It is as clumsy as the Chief Vet’s apologies and efforts on Radio 4’s Farming Today in 2022. Defra boss Richard Benyon has been claiming big figures for badger cull benefits for years, but this does not provide any evidence for them.
What is the ‘true burden of disease’?
The new analysis has a surprising and unconventional interpretation of the ‘true burden of the disease’ or disease ‘prevalence’ in a population. It suggests that ‘incidence’ is the better indicator of true burden, which they must surely understand flies against first principles. It is ‘old thinking’ based on the out-dated views of farm vets who claimed that only visibly lesioned cows are infectious. Yes, incidence has been one unit of disease measurement, and it was the unit used by the RBCT to claim a benefit for badger culling. But science has moved on, and this is a strange attempt to live in the past.
The interpretation contrasts with APHA’s reports and understanding of disease controls if you look closely. It contrasts with the conclusions drawn from better comprehension of the SICCT (skin) test sensitivity and specificity, which has been clarified in recent years. Gamma IFyN testing has revealed a very significant reservoir of undetected reactors (diseased animals) in bTB infected herds, pointing towards undisclosed infection in undetected herds too. This ‘hidden’ reservoir in cattle that remains is what really matters for disease understanding and control. The true burden is bigger than the known breakdowns and identified reactors, why else would the disease persist? Both here and in Republic of Ireland where badgers have been relentlessly persecuted and SICCT and Gamma testing has failed for decades.
So why exactly did APHA attempt this clumsy redefinition of the ‘true burden of disease’. Perhaps because it needs to try to defend the original RBCT analysis which by controversial statistical modelling (5), managed to suggest a relationship between incidence and badger culling, having failed to find a relationship with disease prevalence. The effort applied to carry on killing badgers is deeply disturbing.
But wasn’t bovine TB already reducing before badger culling began?
Levels of Bovine TB were falling in many areas soon after annual SICCT testing was introduced in 2010. And well before culling started in most areas. However, the new APHA analysis reduces the analysis of pre-cull data to one data point. This conveniently helps to conceal the significant pre-cull decline and masks the true disease trajectory and results. A logarithmic scale is also used to distort visual effect. Not unlike methods used in the earlier Brunton and Downs reports.
Recent Edge Area data added into the analysis for what purposes?
The new analysis mixes data from 46 High Risk Area study areas with 6 from the Edge Area. These have very different epidemiological and disease control history profiles and the reason for mixing them is not explained. It looks like a deliberate attempt to manipulate the data. Pre-cull gamma testing was intense in the Edge Area. While the manuscript mentions additional gamma testing from 2017, gamma testing was erratic between areas and over time. There were considerable numbers of gamma reactors in many of the cull areas in cull years 1 and 2 of culling with similar disclosures levels to years 3 and 4, but pre-cull use in the HRA was generally low. Mixing them may give you a result you like, but it can be seen through for what it is.
In both HRA and Edge areas, bTB incidence was declining when many of the additional disease control rules were intensified, and badger culling introduced. The addition of this extra data makes it even more impossible to distinguish effects of badger culling and disease control measures that are known to drive down bTB.
Attempt to dismiss peer-reviewed 2022 study published without mentioning it
A comment in the text of the new pre-print says that it is not possible to match badger culled and control areas. This is not only incorrect but unevidenced, with unsubstantiated claims. The 2022 published and peer reviewed study that used this methodology effectively has not been cited. There is no mention of the even more obvious alternative to their complex DID approach, which would be to simply match a series of individual farms in culled and unculled areas. This approach is only available to APHA, which holds all individual farm records confidentially. Such simple monitoring could and should have been an expected outcome of a High Court ruling that required the government to ‘adapt and learn’ from badger culling. Why has it not been done? Perhaps it has been done but gave the wrong results?
Distinct lack of clarity
There is a definite need for clarity in the analysis presented, including the Appendix. This does not seem to be the output from the constrained DID analysis, but something else that is not fully described in the methodology. Analysis uses the lesser known system called STATA (nearly all analysts use R-code). The data is not supplied, and the Stata code is not supplied, so no one can replicate what has been done here. An author, when contacted, said these would be available following publication of the paper. Too late for others to comment on?
Does this draft show that badger culling has reduced bovine TB In cattle?
No, it doesn’t. Because the methods are inappropriate, the results are flawed, and so the conclusions are wrong. There is no way to distinguish between different interventions and change in herd breakdowns since 2013 with the approach taken. Might these results be misleading and deceive if published? Yes. Why has such a flawed analysis been produced now? Is it a try-on to justify Natural England’s new autumn badger blood-fest? Will Defra contractors, grant recipients and a friendly journal whisk it through peer review with recommended friendly reviewers? Probably.
A consultation on culling all badgers over wide areas is being cooked up despite previous policy promises. One could speculate that APHA have been told both by bosses and lawyers that they need to produce evidence that the culling policy has not been a complete waste of life, public funds, and other resources including masses of police time. They are desperate to do this, and get it out right in front of the move to ‘carry on culling’. This preprint aims to be the new truth about badger culling, but it’s all smoke and mirrors.
Episodic and patchy badger culling has been taking place in England over the last 50 years in an attempt to influence the bovine TB epidemic in cattle herds. And there have also been several ‘experimental’ badger cull trials over that time, the largest of which was the Randomised Badger Culling Trial (1998-2005). The current ‘proactive’ intensive badger culls, where a guesstimated 70-95% of the badger population is killed, began in 2013. We have now had 10 full years of intensive badger culling across the High Risk Area, with over 210,000 badgers reported killed. There have also been experimental badger culls in TB hotspots in at least two places in the ‘Low Risk Area’, where the aim is to kill 100% of the badgers. Killing is now done largely by free-shooting, which is deemed inhumane by the British Veterinary Association because of the cruelty involved.
How is disease control going?
With variations between areas, the general trend for the bovine TB burden in cattle has been downward. However, this decline in bTB cannot be linked to badger culling as in almost all areas bTB rates levelled off and began falling in response to the move to annual cattle testing in 2010, before badger culling began.
Importantly, there has been a further increase in the frequency of cattle testing for bTB over the same period as culling has been taking place, which has begun to remove infected cows slightly more efficiently. Cattle are now tested every 6 months using the tuberculin skin (SICCT) test, and additional testing using Gamma Interferon tests have been introduced to help remove more of undetected but infected cattle. It is this increase in frequency and efficacy of testing that has been reducing the rate of infection, not badger culling.
Analysis shows no difference in disease decline between culled and unculled areas
The most recent peer-reviewed and pubished analysis of the efficacy of badger culling has shown that there was no detectable difference in disease reduction between culled and unculled areas between 2013 and 2020. All that DEFRA has done is make a crude claim that badger culling works, based on reports and data that it has refused to publish or make available for many years and for spurious reasons.
What’s happening now?
Despite the near-complete government news blackout on badger culling, it is still very much government policy. It continues in 60 zones this year, reducing in number by around a third each year until 2025 when the final 23 culls will fizzle out. Natural England have once again authorised badger culling licences for autumn 2023 (announced September 7th). This will mean that up to 26,000 largely completely healthy badgers will be shot dead this year under their watch.
What are Defra’s plans for badger culling in the future?
New report on ‘epidemiological culling’
Despite headlines back in 2020 suggesting that badger culling was to be phased out, the likelihood is that Defra is being cajouled by industry to introduce a new badger culling policy. We understand that a consultation this autumn might seek views on a ‘reactive’, or so-called ‘epidemiological’ culling policy, a method with the core approach banned by government in 2003..
If implemented, this policy would seek to kill 100% of badgers in what are being called bTB ‘cluster’ areas. Although such culls are described in new policy as for ‘exceptional use’ only, it is possible or even likely that they will be implemented wherever bTB is found in cattle and where farmers want to kill badgers. Minette Batters, President of the NFU, has made no secret of her wish to remove badgers from livestock farmland completely, and Defra listen to the wishes of the NFU. The policy does indicate vaccination for any badgers that remain following culling, but this is a policy that clearly continues to attribute significant cattle infection to badgers. This, despite consistently growing scientific evidence for this being extremely unlikely, with weak, equivocal or even manufactured evidence keeping that sentiment alive.
Disease breakdowns continued in Cumbria despite 100% of badgers culled
A trial of this new ‘epi-culling’ approach has been taking place in Cumbria since 2018. Despite eliminating the entire badger population over an area of around 90 sq.km. or more, herd incidents with persistent infections remain unresolved. Bovine TB infection is persistent because it comes from within the herd and from traded stock. There is no credible epidemiological route for infection from badgers. This is useful as a model of why government policy is badly flawed and misguided.
What can we do to stop this?
Years of campaigning by numerous organisations and individuals has so far;
Led to legal challenges in the High Court of aspects of the welfare consequences of, scientific justification for, and potential ecological effects of badger culling
Challenged the certainty of the science being used to justify badger culling with peer-reviewed analyses
Lobbied MP’s repeatedly
Organised over 50 rally’s and marches
Produced many petitions of up to 300,000 signatories
Protesting outside High Court London
But Defra have not listened or even significantly engaged with those opposing badger culling. They are listening to the NFU, the big landowners with a powerful voice, and vets who put their own interests and industry before environment, biodiversity & animal welfare.
The increasing public awareness of climate change impacts and the immediate threat they pose have led to urgent calls to reduce meat and dairy consumption. This in turn should make government take a radical look at the farming industry in the UK, and the policies it is supporting that damage our natural environment. It looks like an impossible task with a government that has no qualms about supporting and subsidising the fossil fuel industry and counts many large land-owners with vested interests amongst its MPs.
Will an election in a little over a years’ time make any difference? Politician’s convictions seem to be increasingly fragile approaching a election, where the importance of green issues to the electorate may be unclear or even antagonize a proportion of it. Whilst polls show that voters rank the environment among the concerns of greatest importance to them, the Uxbridge byelection showed that these issues require careful handling.
Effective caps are needed to block wastefulness and overexploitation of limited resources for trivial activities and inefficient processes. If candidates want your vote at the next election, the political parties & their candidates need to commit to a comprehensive overhaul of farming and environment policies. It is vital to make it crystal clear to them how important these issues are, or they will not commit to addressing them urgently. We may be stuck with badger culling and policies that continue to deplete our natural resources until it is too late to prevent catastrophic damage. Badger culling is just one more symptom of everything that is wrong in environmental protection in England in recent decades. Strong action is needed right now to change the way government thinks and acts. Everyone has a role to play in ensuring that those in power, and those seeking power, know how important environmental issues are, and how their response to them will affect the way we vote.
A quick look at the BBC farming media and sociology, touching on ‘tribalism’, the BTB Partnership and ‘avoiding the facts’. The result: a perfect storm to confuse bovine tuberculosis control.
In 2022 DEFRA took steps, but failed, to try to stop published peer-reviewed science being published in the Veterinary Record (here, here,here and here), disgracefully interfering in the scientific process. Fourteen months later, DEFRA are still unable to produce data or analyses to substantiate their claim that badger culling has resulted in any disease benefit, or indeed has not failed completely. The Minister Therese Coffey now talks about badger culling continuing ‘if the science is good‘ (see here). Last year, the Chief Veterinary Officer Christine Middlemiss on Radio 4s Farming Today, blamed others in DEFRA for the withholding of data on badger culling (listen here). If such data were released, it would quickly allow the use of a wide variety of analyses to check for the efficacy of badger culling. Surely the BBC’s influential Radio 4 flagship farming programme Farming Today, with its one million listeners, would wish to be first to get to the bottom of what is really happening in the badger cull, which is after all, such an important subject. But recent events suggest that they are perhaps, more than hesitant, and might even prefer confusion over clarity?
This month, following enquiries to Farming Today about a misleading story on badger culling by David Gregory Kumar (a BBC reporter from the West Midlands), a follow-up piece was promised by the BBC’s Dimitri Houtart, their ‘Environment, Food, Rural Affairs & Natural History Executive Editor & BBC Rural Affairs Champion’. He said: ‘I have asked my Farming Today team to ensure we mention your complaint and highlight your main points’ On the offending programme on 4th July, Gregory Kumar had played a clip where James Griffiths, a livestock farmer from the Gloucestershire Pilot 1 badger cull area had said ’badger culling has undoubtably made a difference, no one can deny it.’ With Gregory-Kumar then adding, ‘the latest data seems to support this.’ Which it does not. The latest data shows bTB falling generally as it has since around 2015, but the role of badger culling, unseparated from the increased use of better disease tests, is not known. The only published science, checked by a large raft of independent experts, suggests that it has not worked (read here).
Oddly, Gregory Kumar had mentioned the apparent inability of Defra to show badger culling works in an online article that day (see here), reporting a Defra line that analysis of the cull data was not possible due to a lack of comparison sites. This is misinformation because there are many ways to compare Defra’s secret data inside and outside cull areas each year since 2016 to give valid comparison analyses. Is it that Defra don’t get the results they want, or is it that for some reason they are incapable of doing the statistics in question? At least the Secretary of State is referring to ‘if’ the science is good. But the apparent delay in producing good scientific evidence of the benefits of culling is curious. Meanwhile, the government tries once again to bundle a further raft of badger killings through in August to perpetuate the miserable fiasco. Thousands and thousands of completely healthy adult and cub badgers will be killed for no good reason while farmers and the public are misinformed.
Sadly, in this recent episode of media confusion, history was repeating itself, with Gregory Kumar grossly overstating the case for the badger cull working and providing misleading information in the same way on a BBC outlet. Back in 2014 the BBC Editorial Complaints Unit (ECU) partly upheld a complaint against an article that Gregory Kumar wrote on BBC NEWS online, as follows: here is a part of the ruling on Gregory Kumars work:
The committee began by looking at what data there was to support the belief that a badger cull had led to a reduction in TB in cattle.
Given that both the statistics and scientific studies about the link between badger culling and bovine TB levels were inconclusive, the Committee examined whether the article had used clear and precise language to make this apparent to the audience. In doing so, it observed that the badger cull had become a highly divisive issue with those for and against the cull using the findings of different trials to bolster their respective causes and so it was essential that the BBC provided the greatest clarity possible on the subject.
In this context, the Committee believed that the language used in the article had not been sufficiently precise as it suggested that the badger cull might be a factor in helping control the disease when this was scientifically unproven. It considered that, while the data did show a decline in the number of cattle infected with TB in Ireland, there was no conclusive evidence to show that the badger cull had been categorically responsible for any of this decline and so it was inaccurate to say that, along with other measures, it can help control the disease.
On July 4th 2023, misleading information was again given out suggesting that badger culling had worked in Gloucestershire and England, with bTB policy in Wales (without culling) not working so well. However, the epidemiology reports (here) show an influx of diseased cattle into north Wales from Shropshire and Cheshire, providing a simple explanation for this. Local trading is still around 50% of cattle movements in Wales.
Here is the data from Gloucestershire where James Griffiths farms:
There has been an increase from 22 incidents in 2013 when badger culling began to 28 incidents in 2022. It is not hard to spot that badger culling shows no sign of working.
So, Defra persist in withholding data that could tell us if badger culling is working, and continue to allow exaggerated claims for efficacy to be made. And what did Farming Today do to clarify the situation? They got in touch with DEFRA, and on 17 July played bits of an interview with a member of its secretive BTB partnership, Professor Gareth Enticott of the Human Geography Department at Cardiff University.
The bTB Partnership Group was set up in 2021, with the aim ‘to encourage shared ownership, coordination, and decision-making surrounding England’s 25-year bovine TB eradication programme’. In 2022, its chairman John Cross (who has just been given an OBE) when asked its view on a new scientific analysis, said that the group does not have the capacity to consider scientific evidence. This was a surprise as it counts a professor of epidemiology amongst its membership. Other members of the group are largely farmers and vets who believe that badgers should be culled. Wildlife and nature conservation experts are not well represented.
Disappointingly, rather than addressing the point of contention in the previous Farming Today, i.e. whether or not the latest bTB data support the thesis that badger culling is reducing disease in cattle, Prof Enticott introduced the concept of ’post-normal science’. This did not really feel like an appropriate response to a factual and statistical matter concerning real data and the withholding of it for simple analyses. Enticott contended that Farmers may not be keen to wait for data to show that badger culling is effective – was that deemed acceptable? He said words to the effect:
“ …science is never definitive on anything, and that’s how science progresses, that there’s always debate about what works and what doesn’t work. In terms of the badger cull and TB policy as a whole, what you’ve got really is a debate about values which are in contest with each other, so the evidence which has been collected around badger culling reflects a set of different values about what constitutes appropriate evidence, and those values represent or are reflective of the times in which the evidence was collected.
So if we go back 20 – 25 years, you know there was a real hope that the randomized badger culling trial, very scientific approach – that form of evidence seemed to be the kind of the highest level of scientific evidence would provide the answer, and would also convert people into believing that badger culling would work. Now it turns out that that wasn’t actually the case and it wasn’t the case because they’re always these kinds of uncertainties around badger culling. But you can look at that in a number of different ways and always challenge it. So there’s never really going to be a definitive answer.”
This is simply misleading. The RBCT, as a scientific exercise, was aimed at finding out it culling could provide any disease benefit, rather than trying to ‘convert people into believing that badger culling would work’. The recent learning curve from better understanding of testing efficacy is that the ‘all-reactor’ set of results should be used in the analyses; these show no relationship between badger culling and herd breakdown. These comments reduce the conversation to confusion with a jaded view of the science process. Enticott went on:
“The answer really is what kind of science do you want to have. So, in other another environmental controversies people talk about the need for what’s called kind of post-normal science. You often have an issue where the facts are uncertain, values are disputed, the stakes are high, but people need to make a decision quite quickly. Waiting for the evidence of the randomized control trial or whatever, is not going to be appropriate.”
Firstly, the facts are not uncertain (although the interpretation certainly is), and the normal science process is open for business, it is just Defra don’t want to let go of data, talk about analytical procedure or publish results because they just want to carry on killing badgers. There never was any hurry, everyone knew that bTB was spread long distance in lorries and the skin test was not clearing herds properly. The reality was a conscious policy choice to carry on ‘trading dirty’ rather than lock down, while blaming the badgers. Enticott continued:
“You need to develop different ways of collecting information and doing science, and people refer to that as post-normal science. Now one of the ways in which you might do that is by kind of accepting that you know different forms of evidence are limited and there are problems with them.”
Well, anyone interested in post-normal science is welcome to Google it. It looks like a bit of a neo-liberal mandate to make it up as you go along. Promoted by an ‘International Society for Ecological Economics’…… While it can be appreciated as a kick-back on the current trend to twist data with dubious modelling, it looks like the kind of rationale that could be used to help reduce the planet to dust. You must wonder if Farming Today’s million listeners were given a clear insight into the concept and its application to bovine TB control.
This must be an example of the BBC at its worst and you have to wonder what Gregory-Kumar and Dimitri Houtart are up to. Do they know what they are doing or are they just two more of John Krebs sticky people (see here)?
Gareth Enticott articulated that farmers hold their own views on the effects of badgers on biodiversity and would be keen to take control of badger numbers for that reason, which is very revealing but not very helpful. Any move towards farmer-led/informed manipulation of the ecosystem remains illegal because of the barbaric treatment of wild and domestic animals by a range of sadistic people. The legal protection of badgers was a move that reflected the wishes of the public in the 1970’s who had witnessed decades of sickening abuse. Animal welfare, like science, progresses by careful process. It marks out some measure of human progress and humility. The role of badgers in the ecosystem would be much better understood if Natural England and DEFRA had done what they promised a High Court Judge they would do in 2018 and monitor the ecological consequences of removing hundreds of thousands of them. But that has been strongly resisted, and substituted with feeble ‘rule of thumb‘ assumptions.
The effectiveness of badger culling as a disease control measure remains unproven, and this is what needs to be communicated to the farming community effectively. Then they can stop wasting their own, as well as public money on a badger culling policy that is expensive, and ultimately has not had, and never will have, any measurable or actual impact on bTB in cattle.
Back in 2012, ‘Bourne’s carrot’ was the phrase developed from the rumoured whisper in a Westminster corridor, to John Bourne, who ran the RBCT. The metaphorical carrot offered killing badgers to help incentivise farmers to test and remove infected cows. We have had a long era of Fake News and ‘winner takes all’ mentality. Can the truth prevail? Not with post-normal science one suspects.
Since 2011, there have been books exposing government incompetence in livestock disease management (1) and the jumping to conclusions by social analysts on the advice of vested interests (2). There has been the cautioning by an exiting Chief Scientist on ‘tribalism’ and its drug-like ability to bring civil servants into conformity (here). The farming and veterinary sectors, alongside vested academia still struggle to come to terms with the reality that badgers are not implicated in any significant spread of Bovine TB in cattle herds. Which players will be the first to accept the wickedness (here) of the situation, and will the media finally spot what is ultimately in the best interest of farmers, cows and badgers? Has post-normal science been hiding in plain site since 2011 – it looks decidedly possible. Will BBC Farming Today and other farming media be able to cope? Probably not on current form – we will see.
A full transcript of the Farming Today piece from 17th July is availablehere.
(1) Why were you Wicked to Badgers?, May 2022. Book Review: A History of Uncertainty – Bovine Tuberculosis in Britain 1850 to the Present, Peter J Atkins, 2016, Winchester University Press (2) Book Review: Vermin, Victims and Disease. April 2020. British Debates over Bovine Tuberculosis and Badgers, by Angela Cassidy
Badgers have been speaking up for themselves in Oxford this week. They have been making their presence felt, raising awareness of the current government badger cull policy, and explaining what the future of badger culling could look like in Oxfordshire. Now that Minister Therese Coffey has thrown doubt over government previously stated intentions to stop culling in 2025, everyone needs to be alert to a possible U-turn on getting rid of badger culling for good.
The Oxforshire Badger Coalition (OBC) is a growing network of people and organisations from Oxfordshire and beyond who are concerned about the continuing, and potentially accelerating government badger cull policy. This is a policy that is based on the Randomised Badger Cull Trials (RBCT) and what Lord John Krebs described recently in the House of Lords as ‘unsettled science’.
Badger culling has been happening in Oxfordshire since 2020, firstly on the periphery as overspill from adjoining counties, then with a full cull area added each subsequent year. An estimated 50% or more of the county now has culling, with 5000 or more badgers shot so far, and plans for thousands more this year and next.
The situation for Oxfordshire’s badgers is moving to a point where there is a serious risk that culling is running out of control. The NFU has been setting up large ‘cluster area’ projects that may include future 100% culling, perhaps starting next year and even though bovine TB breakdowns have reduced greatly in recent years with better testing.
The risk is a change from the existing proactive policy, to a new reactive culling policy, a move that it is thought will be subject to consultation later this year. No culling, even in exceptional circumstances, is warranted. Reactive culling threatens to become the ‘new normal’, but it is not based on sound or impartial epidemiological evidence (1). The result could be 15 more years of 100% localized badger culling, and another 200,000 or more largely healthy badgers killed.
This is justified in part by Minster (Spencer) claiming in Parliament that badger culling is working, with a 45% benefit after three years and 50% after four years, but these numbers have no peer-reviewed or even published basis, and appear to be misinformation. Alternative peer-reviewed analyses (2) show that badger culling has produced no benefit in disease reduction. Despite a lot of claims and accusations by government, this work has not been effectively challenged.
The Oxfordshire Badger Coalition is determined to raise the profile of these issues in Oxfordshire over the coming months, so you may be seeing more badgers in Oxford in the very near future. Please say hello, and if you can, join in and spread the word. Most members of the public who stopped to say hello this week were supportive and said that they were not aware that the government is still killing badgers. This is because both badger culling and the results are being being kept secret from the public from reasons that remain unclear.
A new article in the May issue of British Wildlife magazine provides an overview of the current state of affairs with badger culling in England, and a welcome update on the science surrounding the issue.
It looks at new work that questions the role that badgers play in bovine TB in cattle, and what the most likely reasons behind the perpetuation of the disease are.
It also looks at the problems that badger culling is likely to be causing to the ecosystem in general, and whether or not this is being adequately monitored or mitigated.
There is a potted history of legal challenges to the badger cull, and a view on the insight and benefits that this difficult work has provided.
It looks at where the current government intends to take the badger culling policy next, and what ‘epidemiological culling’ could mean for our badgers in the future.
You can access a copy of the article here, for a charge of 99p.
Below is a summary table of the number of badger cull zones in each county of England since 2013 and those predicted according to government indications until 2025 (end of January 2026). A measure of culling intensity is the number of cull areas, although some counties such as Somerset are far larger than others. It’s a sickening reminder of how extensive the culls have been, with already over 210,00 mostly healthy badgers reported shot, and many thousands of adults and cubs injured by the cruel methods used.
The ‘zones’ are the HRA (High Risk Area) the Edge (Edge Area) and the LRA (Low RIsk Area). Cumbria* and Lincolnshire* have been subject to localised culling of 100% of badgers. Some of the cull areas overlap with other cull areas, so this is a generalised picture.
The Abstract of a paper on the potential harmful impacts of badger culling on other species and habitats in the Journal of Zoology (1) this year has been amended to better reflect the contents of the paper.
The original Abstract of the paper, whose authors include two Natural England employees working alongside researchers from the British Trust for Ornithology on licensing the culling of badgers, contained a sentence saying that badger removal ‘..has not affected bird populations..’. However, the important main conclusion from the work, and one better supported by the findings of the analyses, was rather different – that ‘A landscape scale, quasi-experimental approach is strongly recommended to provide stronger inference about the complex potential ecological effects of culling predators such as the badger.’
The changes reflect and highlight the paucity of effort that government has taken to investigate ecological impacts since mass badger culling began in 2013. Defra and Natural England escaped full judicial scrutiny earlier this year by a ‘smoke and mirrors’ approach to remaking an impugned decision to disregard side-effects on wildlife outside designated sites. Behind the backs of the claimant, and of the court (see here) they made just enough of a procedural correction to satisfy the judiciary. They kept their ’do nothing’ approach alive, at least until new powers arrive under the new Environment Act once that is enacted.
In recent weeks, Natural England have been approached via lawyers to address the issue of the ‘strong recommendation’ in the August 2022 paper. They have been asked how they have responded to the published finding that a different, larger scale approach is needed before the potential damage from badger culling can be properly assessed, when granting licences to mass-kill badgers over the wider countryside. Government’s entrenched position in 2021 was that ecological studies were too expensive, and it was ‘too late’ for meaningful research as badger culling is being phased out by 2025.
Such impacts are important when considering the fate of European Protected Species and those priority species and habitats afforded protection under the 2006 NERC Act. There are legal duties to fulfil.
Dominic Woodfield has provided expert advice and witness statements relating to challenges to Natural England’s defective approach to protecting nature in England when organising badger culling over the last five years, including High Court rulings where judges found that NE had been in breach of its statutory duty by neglecting nature conservation protection. He said:
“The abstract of a paper is the most public-facing element and often the only bit that gets read by busy people looking to gain a rapid insight into current science and issues. It is therefore very important that it is an accurate summary of the conclusions reached.
We don’t know whether the original authors or the Journal editors were responsible for the error of representation in the abstract in this case, but it is evident that the publisher now accepts and agrees that it was misleading and that it did not reflect the actual results and conclusions of the study. Perhaps incidentally, or perhaps not, it had the further effect of masking the inadequacy of the effort made by Natural England to investigate insidious but potentially significant side-effects on sensitive bird species arising from the Government’s badger culling policy – side-effects that remain a mystery after an unknown amount of money wasted on meaningless desk-top analyses.
The study actually, and inevitably, concludes with a statement that vindicates mine and others’ view that the approach being reported on is a waste of public money and tantamount to kicking the can down the road for fear of getting an unwanted answer. As a body no longer even semi-autonomous from Government, one might expect Natural England to want to ‘spin’ the presentation of the results, but if that is indeed what happened here, it would be a matter of much more concern that the BTO would seem to have been complicit in such actions.“
The correction to the abstract of the paper is shown below.
Abstract Since 2013, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has licenced culling of European badger (Meles meles) populations in several English regions. In the first 7 years, more than 100 000 badgers have been removed. It is critical to evaluate the ecological impact of severely depressing the population of a widespread predator from large areas of the country, such as effects on breeding bird populations. Citizen science survey data on the abundance of breeding birds supports the estimation of population trends, i.e. whether species are exhibiting population growth or declines, and the effects of potential environmental influences, such as badger removal, on these trends. Here, these survey data are used together with data on the presence and amount of culling in an area to explore whether removing badgers has an effect on breeding bird populations both inside and outside culling zones from 2013–2019. This is not equivalent to a controlled trial, but collects critical, landscape-scale evidence in real-world conditions. In analyses evaluating the effect of culling presence, 18 of 55 bird species showed significant or near-significant growth rate changes. Of these, four species had higher growth rates and 14 exhibited lower growth rates in cull areas, compared to areas outside of the culling zones. When using culling intensity data to assess the impact on growth rates, 10 of 55 species showed significant or near-significant results, with only one species exhibiting a higher population growth rate in the presence of more intensive culling. Predicted sensitivity to badger effects based on species’ ecologies did not predict whether the measured relationships were significant, or their directions, suggesting that other factors underlie the patterns seen. Hence, there was little evidence to indicate consistent, community-level effects of badger removal on bird populations. Reasons why this predator removal has not affected bird populations are discussed. A landscape scale, quasi-experimental approach is strongly recommended to provide stronger inference about the complex potential ecological effects of culling predators such as the badger.
This correction was added to the Journal paper on 4th November 2022.
Over the last three years, the science base for badger culling has shrivelled away from ‘not very much’, to nothing. It has regressed from speculation that it might enable a modest annual reduction of bTB in cattle, to the reality that after 7 years of study, there is no measurable benefitwhencomparing herd breakdown rates in culled and unculled parts of the High Risk Area. It doesn’t work. This is one reason the government refuses to talk about it. Not only did the 2018 spike in bTB breakdowns in Gloucestershire show how unlikely it is that the killing of badgers is linked to the epidemiology of cattle breakdowns. It showed how cautiously the model-based claims of the Animal Plant and Health Agency (APHA) after 2 and then 4 years of culling should be considered. Subsequent detailed examination of all the government data this year in a peer reviewed paper (Langton et al) showed the badger culls to have failed.
Following a ridiculous three months of trying and failing to block and then rubbish the new scientific paper, Defra stopped communicating with the authors and enquiring journalists, leaving Natural England (NE) with the difficult decision of whether to continue issuing licences. The government response was to re-deploy Andrew Robertson from the government’s TB HUB information service in Exeter to Natural England in May of this year “because of a lack of expertise” inside the NE organisation. The outcome was that Natural England supported Defra’s position and issued yet more badger culling licences. Initially more Supplementary culling licences were approved by NE in May, this despite the fact that there was no benefit after 4 years to maintain for a further 5 years. Then in August, NE were somehow prepared to extend their belief in the killing of badgers and to continue culling badgers based on their own unpublished ‘secret’ science.
Instead of stopping culling as they should have done, NE have taken a nebulous stance on the science. It has refused to provide any written justification for its position, perpetuating its belief in the use of secrecy to prevent public scrutiny of their competence and decision making. The public have a right to see the rationale for their decisions, but this has been withheld. It is clear that NE have worked very very hard this year to facilitate continued issue of licences. They do this for a combination of reasons. They are likely fearful of contradicting Defra and APHA. Perhaps it would be too difficult to admit to failure on such a sensitive area.
Over the summer, NE Chairman Tony Juniper chose not to reply to communications, preferring to talk vaguely on public panels about NE not wanting culling and preferring vaccination. This summer he had a big chance to stop badger culling. He didn’t. He has now been in charge during the culling of most of the approximately 200,000 badgers. He and George Eustice have carried out what some call the near eradication of badgers over large parts of England.
NE eventually responded this week following a legal pre-action letter, sent in early October. They claimed that the death of the Queen and changes in government had prevented the licensing paperwork from being shared with those asking for it. These are embarrassing excuses for the lack of provision of legally required documents, on such a controversial subject of high public interest, and they reflect poorly on those responsible.
Information released late on Friday 28th October, showed 11 new cull areas, and the potential for tens of thousands more badgers to be killed. Over 30,000 or so could have already been shot over the last 8 weeks in a further sickening Natural England licenced ‘bloodfest’ of largely healthy badgers. One thing is certain, this is Natural England’s work. Natural England carry the torch for badger culling even if they say they are only following orders. As they have since 2012, when someone thought it would be a good idea for NE to carry it out and control it. They certainly have. It is the legacy of those involved with NE past and present, as much as anyone.
Another chance to read an important guest article entiled; ‘Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) data, badger culls, Natural England and the British Trust for Ornithology: New paper, same old.’ by Dominic Woodfield that first appeared on Mark Avery’s blog on 23rd September
Dominic Woodfield is a highly experienced practitioner in Environmental Impact Assessment and Habitats Regulations Assessment. Most of his work is for the development sector, but he has also undertaken commissions for Natural England, the RSPB, Wildlife Trusts and campaign groups. He once mounted a succesful independent legal challenge in defence of an important site for butterflies in Bicester, Oxfordshire.
Most readers would, I imagine, concur that an increase in fox populations in places where there are vulnerable ground nesting waders and waterfowl might be a matter worthy of conservation concern and attention. Especially where such increases are substantial (as much as a doubling of numbers), and arise as a consequence of a specific controllable human intervention, such as culling up to 95% of badgers across large swathes of English countryside.
Natural England (NE), which issues the licences to cull badgers, is obliged by statute to assess the potential side effects of badger culling on other species. When it comes to designated sites – SACs, SPAs, Ramsar Sites and SSSIs – NE do (now) acknowledge that a ‘predator release’ effect (where foxes and other mammalian predators increase in number via backfilling the ecological niche vacated by culled badgers) is an impact risk. Under pressure from legal challenges since 2017, NE has developed detailed guidelines for such assessments, amended their assessment procedures and added restrictions onto licences to better take this risk into account and/or mitigate potential effects on such sites. But outside these sites and across the larger part of the countryside in cull zones, the same birds, as far as NE are concerned, are on their own. There are no procedures for assessment or protection.
The small group within NE that processes and issues cull licences describes the ecological risks associated with ‘predator release effect’ as a consequence of badger culling as “theoretical”. This is despite their being flagged as a risk worthy of further investigation in the wake of the Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT) in 2007 (Defra 2007) and again in 2011 (Fera 2011). This loose end did not trouble the masterminds behind the current badger cull, which commenced in 2013, nor those responsible for cull licensing within NE. At least it didn’t until relatively recently. Ultimately, it took the pressure of tribunals and legal challenge and the scrutiny of the courts in 2018, five years after the cull had started and with tens of thousands of badgers already removed, to force the agency charged with protecting our wildlife to finally promise a High Court judge they’d look more closely at this issue.
It’s conceivable that NE then asked the Government, through Defra, to fund a proper study and the Government refused. We don’t know. But in any event the outcome was that instead of a properly designed and controlled investigation, NE elected to go ‘cheap and cheerful’. Behind a wall of secrecy, they commissioned the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) to conduct a simple desk study, extracting subsets of volunteer data from the Breeding Birds Survey (BBS) for cull and non-cull areas, and comparing them to see if there were any patterns to be found that might be attributable to badger removal. When, in 2018, the BTO unsurprisingly reported to NE that nothing conclusive could be gotten from such a coarse approach (Kettel and Siriwardena 2018), NE chose to interpret that as indicative that there was no issue to be concerned about, and advised Ministers and the Courts the same.
This is all old news of course, especially for readers of my previous guest blog, kindly published by Mark on 18th June (see here). In it I criticised the methodology and utility of these desk-top analyses of BBS data, the secrecy around them, and how NE’s chosen ‘absence of evidence is evidence of absence’ interpretation was used to inform badger culling policy decisions at Government level, without the benefit of such ‘science’ being through independent peer review or subject to any public scrutiny.
One of the BTO scientists involved was piqued into responding (his remarks can be found in the comments section under the blog, again (here). Amongst a somewhat prickly defence of the study’s approach and methodology, he conceded two of the central premises underpinning mine and others’ concerns. One: that the study did little to answer questions about the wider ecological side effects of removing as much as 95% of the population of an apex predator across large areas of English countryside. And two: that ecological side-effects from removing badgers from the ecosystem were, to use his word, “certain”. Notwithstanding what those two concessions, when read together, say about the worth of this form of study, he said that he stood by it and furthermore that the BTO had been commissioned to repeat it in 2022.
The results of this repeat exercise have just been published in the Journal of Zoology. The paper is titled Ward et al. 2022 “Breeding bird population trends during 2013-2019 inside and outside of European badger control areas in England”. The abstract can be accessed here (but the full paper is behind a paywall). I encourage interested minds to read the full thing. Does it represent a robust way of finding out whether localised predator increases as a consequence of removal of badgers are having any impact on local populations of sensitive ground nesting species, such as lapwing, redshank, snipe or curlew?
My own thoughts on this question are below. Ward et al. 2022 essentially repeats the exercise carried out in 2018 and modified in Kettel et al. 2021, albeit with a slightly bigger data input. For me, the biggest difference is a much-improved discussion. Indeed, anyone who read my previous blog will observe that despite neither myself or any of the other more vocal critics of the 2021 paper (and its suppressed 2018 predecessor) being part of the peer review process, the discussion within the new paper rather reads as if we were! It attempts, at least, to respond directly to some of the criticisms of the methodology of analysis, the utility of the results and the inherent problems of bias, that were levelled at both Kettel et al. 2021 and Kettel and Siriwardena 2018.
In consequence, the authors are now more openly cognisant of the fact that studies this coarse-grained, data-limited and with such little statistical power, are never likely to detect impacts anything short of catastrophic for any individual bird species. It now also appears to be recognised by the authors that this sort of high-level approach inherently militates against the prospect of arriving at any conclusive answers to the fundamental question – is badger culling having a collateral ecological effect of relevance in conservation terms on any individual bird species?
All of which means NE have frittered away a further four years and paid the BTO an unknown quantity of public money to conclude, as Ward et al. 2022 does, that it’s not clear whether there is an effect or not and that answering the question would need better, more targeted investigation. The same conclusion reached fifteen years ago following the RBCT, again by Fera in 2011 and further reiterated by the Godfray Review of 2018 (Godfray et al. 2018). That a proper study is necessary and important. Not exactly revelatory – indeed it is no more than critics of NE’s lackadaisical approach to assessing the collateral ecological impacts from badger culling have been urging for years.
Although the authors’ discussion of the results in Ward et al. 2022 is an improvement on previous iterations, the continued application of a flawed methodological approach renders the study only marginally less worthless than its predecessors. The 2022 version remains, in particular, compromised by the decision to lump species at high risk of predation effects together with those at inherently lower risk, and by the inescapable fact that the BBS dataset is too coarse grained to provide a sufficient platform for sensible analysis for precisely the scarcer species – such as ground nesting waders – that should be a focus of concern. Instead, and in common with its 2018 and 2021 predecessors, the study contrives an ecologically nonsensical guild of “ground nesting” species on the basis of a single common parameter – that they construct nests generally within 0.5m of the ground. Thus, ecologically disparate species such as chiffchaff, herring gull and coot are homogenised into a single receptor with a standardised susceptibility to mammalian predation. The continued failure of the authors to properly explain, qualify or acknowledge the deficiencies of this approach is glaring. They either genuinely believe that vulnerable species such as lapwing, nesting on the ground, in open uncluttered environments such as arable fields, are at the same risk of predation from larger mammalian predators as a whitethroat in a bramble thicket, or they are wilfully building a massive source of obfuscation and bias into the methodology. Either way, it muddies the waters and fatally undermines the study.
Sadly, predetermined bias is not just restricted to the methodological design. It also infects the syntax of the discussion and conclusions of the paper. Most glaring perhaps is the abstract – the bit one can read for free – concluding with a wholly unsupported premise – that “this predator removal has not affected bird populations”. That might be the conclusion the authors from Natural England (and Defra) wish casual readers to take from the study, but for those who read the full paper, it’s not actually a conclusion supported by the analyses. I am surprised this statement survived the peer review process and that the BTO authors (at least) would allow such an unevidenced leap of logic. In contrast, the all-important last line of the conclusions calling for a landscape-scale quasi-experimental approach: “to provide stronger inference about the complex potential ecological effects of culling predators such as the badger” didn’t make it into the abstract. Strange that.
So, beyond the authors’ clearer acknowledgement of the fundamental limitations of the exercise, Ward et al. 2022 merely perpetuates the uncertainty that has presided over this question since the end of the Randomised Badger Control Trial, fifteen years ago. In other words, it does nothing to progress Defra’s, the Secretary of State’s, Natural England’s, conservationists or the wider public’s understanding of collateral ecological effects from badger culling any further forward from the position prior to the current cull starting in 2013. At all the junctures in time cited above, independent review has indicated that further investigation into the ecological side effects from badger culling was merited. All NE have actually done in the wake of their promise to a High Court judge in 2018 is commission a spectacularly coarse analysis which was never likely to deliver anything close to a useful answer, suppress the results for three years and now repeat it. A cynic might conclude that this is deliberate – a means to be seen to be doing something in the face of repeated legal challenges that exposed systemic failures by NE to properly assess impacts – whilst actually kicking the can down the road.
There is one paragraph worthy of note in the discussion of the results. Despite the continued determination of the authors to muddy the waters by casting the analytical net to include species of inherent low-vulnerability to predation by ground-based mammalian predators – such as nuthatch and green woodpecker (really, guys?), the authors do for the first time note and discuss separately the negative trends indicated for two of the species which actually ought to be the critical focus – lapwing and curlew. It is worthy of remark, at least, that such trends as there are for these species appear more or less consistently negative across all three iterations of BTO analysis. Finally, this has been remarked upon in Ward et al 2022. The problem of course is that this potential cause for concern should have triggered further targeted investigation – along the lines that the paper now suggests – much, much earlier. Not now, nearly ten years too late.
Repeating a near-pointless study again and again is, in my view, a poorly disguised exercise in obfuscation and delay. An excuse to do nothing more meaningful, just in case that gives you an awkward answer. But don’t listen to my cynicism and take my word for it. Read Ward et al. 2022 and ask yourself whether this is valuable and robust science being commissioned by Natural England and/or a good use of the time and resources of the BTO and of the data that it receives from volunteers. Do you think this type of data analysis exercise has any conceivable prospect of determining whether curlew in Somerset, redshank in Gloucestershire or stone curlew in Wiltshire are experiencing increased predation pressure as a consequence of badger removal? Do you agree with NE that ‘absence of evidence is evidence of absence’? Or alternatively, ‘if you can’t see the wood for the trees, it means there is no wood’.
If you would like to leave a comment about this blog you can do so at the end of the article on Mark Avery’s site here.
Professor Sir Charles Godfray FRS (Chair); Professor Christl Donnelly FRS; Professor Glyn Hewinson; Professor Michael winter OBE; Professor James Wood. (October 2018) Bovine TB strategy review. Report to Rt Hon Michael Gove MP, Secretary of State, Defra. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/review-of-governments-bovine-tb-strategy-published
Esther F. Kettel, Ivan Lakin, Matthew J. Heydon & Gavin M. Siriwardena (2020) A comparison of breeding bird populations inside and outside of European Badger Meles meles control areas, Bird Study, 67:3, 279-291, DOI: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00063657.2021.1889460
Kettel, E.F. and G. M. Siriwardena 2018. Comparisons of breeding bird population and abundance trends within and outside two specified areas located in SW England. Unpublished (confidential) Report to Natural England. British Trust for Ornithology, Thetford, Norfolk, UK. V. Ward, M. Heydon, I. Lakin, A. J. Sullivan, G. M. Siriwardena. (2022) Breeding bird population trends during 2013–2019 inside and outside of European badger control areas in England. Journal of Zoology 108. https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jzo.13010
Dominic Dyer, chairing the State of the Earth evening session at Birdfair on 15th July this year, asked two of his assembled panel guests about badger culling. The first, Sir Iain Boyd, the former Chief Scientific Advisor (CSA) to Defra commented, beyond his usual emphasis that the problem is more with people than badgers, that he “suspected that the evidence is suggesting it doesn’t work”. And “if badger culling isn’t working it shouldn’t be done, that’s absolutely clear.” Presumably, a reference to the most recent peer reviewed science (here).
The second guest, Tony Juniper, currently chairman of Natural England, freshly reappointed for another 3 years, was asked about the ecological impact of changing ecosystems by removing most of a dominant species. His response was slightly less coherent. Knowing his staff had just issued more supplementary killing licences and were in the final stages of lining up licences for a further 40,000 mostly healthy badgers to be killed this and the following three autumns. He picked words carefully: “we did say that it wouldn’t be a good idea” and “Natural England’s advice was that it probably wouldn’t work and we should try other methods” and (not answering the question) “will it have an effect on protected sites and protected species?.. we are looking at that too.”
Not mentioned by him, Juniper’s hands were tied due to a legal case that would play out a fortnight later in the High Court, that turned into a spectacular environmental travesty (here), remining us just how far government and the judiciary are now leaning towards unsound, politically expedient policies. Briefly, Defra remade its improper decision not to look at impacts from badger culling, supported by Natural England, without telling the court or the claimant. It rubber stamped its do-nothing approach in a way that meant Defra and Natural England could carry on doing little or nothing, escaping justice via the back door. It was ‘too late and too expensive’ now to study and deal with the problem anyway, was their best position, and that was their final decision. Looking at it was all they were doing.
Natural England had promised the courts in 2018 that they were on the case, with a research programme that was kept secret. Secret, it turns out because the BTO analysis used to justify continued culling had mistakes in it, and so had to be held back for two years while culling continued and Natural England staff worked with BTO to get the work through peer review. More recent events in the sorry saga have been exposed thanks to wildlife stalwart Mark Avery (here) and his guest blogs by the main expert witness for the three Judicial Reviews, Dominic Woodfield (here). Dominic has, in his blogs and comments, unzipped the whole matter from start to finish and dealt with the response from BTO during the sordid passage of the work over its last five years. It is worth taking the time to read the new blog and those that went before, to get a firm understanding of how Natural England have obfuscated their statutory duty and worked hard at minimising effort to examine the problem, while at the same time helping badger cull companies with advice and support to find their cull targets.
Juniper is aware of this of course, and efforts to get funding from Defra to look at the issue may have been turned down. But he has another problem. He has a relationship with and has written a book with Prince Charles. Who is a known lobbiest for badger culling, with his ‘black spider’ letters urging Tony Blair to start culling, a notable royal intervention (here). There followed a concerted effort to neutralise badger culling opposition in mainstream wildlife ngos between 2008 and 2013. Now Prince is King, what will happen? The King faces the reality that the tenuous evidence of badger involvement in bTB in cattle fifteen years ago, then presented as strong evidence, remain tenuous. Critically, recently published research using all of the relevant government data suggests that badger culling since 2013 simply shows no sign at all of working. This is despite Defra’s attempt to use small selective amounts of data with over-elaborate variables to try to show that it does. Defra used their most senior staff CSA Gideon Henderson and Chief Vet Christine Middlemiss to try to rebut the new published research, but this has only made them look foolish. They published, then retracted flawed data (here) that showed huge benefits from badger culling in its first two years, while insisting in their rebuttal of the new analysis that there is little or no benefit to be had in the first 2 years. Leaving professional vets, scientists and commentators completely baffled. Juniper and Charles III now have a big opportunity to help put things right that have gone terribly wrong on their watch.
Most of all, with the BTO paper just published (behind a pay wall), there is a final piece of chicanery. There is no sign of the all-important last line of the conclusions in the papers introductory abstract. The latest BTO magazine simply says that a similar (to the new publication) minimal approach might be repeated. Yet in the BTO paper, the authors call for a landscape-scale quasi-experimental approach: “to provide stronger inference about the complex potential ecological effects of culling predators such as the badger”
More and more journals are making sure that study limitations are placed in scientific papers and their abstracts, partly a response to the science reproducibility crisis. What this all means is that Natural England corner-cut to address important questions about the effects of the ecological impact of culling. It now admits that the minimal approach it employed is inadequate, and points to the kind of study it now agrees should have been done. This, in truth, is confession of guilt when there is little chance of a retrial before thousands more badgers are gunned down.
The Oxforshire Badger Coalition (OBC) is a growing network of people and organisations from Oxfordshire and beyond who are concerned about the continuing, and potentially accelerating government badger cull policy. This is a policy that is based on the Randomised Badger Cull Trials (RBCT) and what Lord John Krebs described recently in the House of Lords as ‘unsettled science’.
The situation for Oxfordshire’s badgers is moving to a point where there is a serious risk that culling is running out of control. The NFU has been setting up large ‘cluster area’ projects that may include future 100% culling, perhaps starting next year and even though bovine TB breakdowns have reduced greatly in recent years with better testing.
This is justified in part by Minster (Spencer) claiming in Parliament that badger culling is working, with a 45% benefit after three years and 50% after four years, but these numbers have no peer-reviewed or even published basis, and appear to be misinformation. Alternative peer-reviewed analyses 
Natural England (NE), which issues the licences to cull badgers, is obliged by statute to assess the potential side effects of badger culling on other species. When it comes to designated sites – SACs, SPAs, Ramsar Sites and SSSIs – NE do (now) acknowledge that a ‘predator release’ effect (where foxes and other mammalian predators increase in number via backfilling the ecological niche vacated by culled badgers) is an impact risk. Under pressure from legal challenges since 2017, NE has developed detailed guidelines for such assessments, amended their assessment procedures and added restrictions onto licences to better take this risk into account and/or mitigate potential effects on such sites. But outside these sites and across the larger part of the countryside in cull zones, the same birds, as far as NE are concerned, are on their own. There are no procedures for assessment or protection.
The results of this repeat exercise have just been published in the Journal of Zoology. The paper is titled Ward et al. 2022 “Breeding bird population trends during 2013-2019 inside and outside of European badger control areas in England”. The abstract can be accessed 
Although the authors’ discussion of the results in Ward et al. 2022 is an improvement on previous iterations, the continued application of a flawed methodological approach renders the study only marginally less worthless than its predecessors. The 2022 version remains, in particular, compromised by the decision to lump species at high risk of predation effects together with those at inherently lower risk, and by the inescapable fact that the BBS dataset is too coarse grained to provide a sufficient platform for sensible analysis for precisely the scarcer species – such as ground nesting waders – that should be a focus of concern. Instead, and in common with its 2018 and 2021 predecessors, the study contrives an ecologically nonsensical guild of “ground nesting” species on the basis of a single common parameter – that they construct nests generally within 0.5m of the ground. Thus, ecologically disparate species such as chiffchaff, herring gull and coot are homogenised into a single receptor with a standardised susceptibility to mammalian predation. The continued failure of the authors to properly explain, qualify or acknowledge the deficiencies of this approach is glaring. They either genuinely believe that vulnerable species such as lapwing, nesting on the ground, in open uncluttered environments such as arable fields, are at the same risk of predation from larger mammalian predators as a whitethroat in a bramble thicket, or they are wilfully building a massive source of obfuscation and bias into the methodology. Either way, it muddies the waters and fatally undermines the study.