Everything changes but stays the same?
2024 has been a remarkable year, where it seems that better awareness of the bovine TB scandal is emerging. Yet institutional forces struggle to grapple with poor science, the embarrassment of failing policy and the need for decisive steps to overcome decades of oversight, dogma and vested interest.
In February, DEFRA’s Animal and Plant Agency (APHA) published a controversial paper (Birch et al.) in Scientific Reports that the DEFRA Minister Steve Barclay trumpeted immediately as showing that badger culling since 2013 was ‘working’ (see here). The journal and the authors refused to change a misleading abstract that implied this, despite the paper stating twice (on careful reading) that the observed overall reduction in bovine TB over the study period could not be attributed to badger culling. All disease measures implemented, including more frequent cattle testing, were analysed together with no control. Basically the analysis is just a time period study, as pointed out in Prof David Macdonald’s earlier comments on the draft paper (see here) for work already labelled as policy-led science (see here).
DEFRA’s tactics appeared to be to try to justify badger culling in order to reverse the ‘phasing out’ of badger culling by the 2020 ‘Next Steps’ policy. This was perhaps also addressing the High Court’s expectation, stated 5 years previously, that policy should ‘adapt and learn’ from the results of Supplementary Badger Culling. The DEFRA plan, as revealed on 14th March, was to introduce something called ‘targeted culling‘ (see here), which was in reality a rebranding of epidemiological culling as carried out in the Low Risk Area (‘LRA Culling’) of England since 2018, including in Cumbria, south of Penrith. In this and a further cull area in Lincolnshire, culling of 100% of badgers in a core area and beyond was permitted over three or more years, with some badger vaccination afterwards. DEFRA refused to comment on a detailed report (here) documenting its epidemiological failings and its continuing clumsy approach to investigating sources of infection. Even now new breakdowns are happening in the Cumbria Area 32 due to unwise cattle trading and persistent infection.
The March 2024 DEFRA plan was to allow extensive culling into the future across England at the discretion of the Chief Veterinary Officer, potentially under a general licence, further negating provisions of the Protection of Badgers Act 1992. It looked like Defra were trying to put a policy in place before a General Election, to commence in autumn 2024. The DEFRA plan looked like a normalization of widespread badger culling into the future. Likely to further stimulate illegal badger culling that is now reported to be rife in some bovine TB areas.
Problems for Defra came from two important interventions. A prompt Freedom of Information request to determine Natural England’s reasons for continuing the licensing of Supplementary Badger Culling (extension from 4 to up to 9 years of culling) resulted in disclosure of their weak scientific justification (see here). Secondly, legal complaints that the five week consultation period was too short to evaluate the APHA paper and the government’s somewhat confusing interpretation of it, resulted on 19th April, in an extension by 3 weeks of the consultation period, to 13th May (see here).
A pre-action protocol letter for Judicial Review regarding the March proposals to ‘evolve the badger control policy’ was lodged on 16th May (see here). The legal challenge was to the consultation itself, arguing that it was :
- Misleading and provided inadequate information regarding badger culling efficacy
- Failed to provide information on potential ecological impacts of the policy
- Lacked meaningful information on economic impacts of the policy
Ultimately, the consultation fell victim to the announcement by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on 22nd May of a General Election on 4th July. This froze consideration of the consultation responses until after the election. The Labour Party manifesto for the 2024 General Election was published on 13th June, and stated its intention to end “ineffective” badger culling, as previously pledged during the 2019 general election. Labour had been keeping very quiet about its position on culling in the months leading up to the election. Presumably this was a tactic to placate the farming vote which was needed before Reform UK Party decided to stand. It appeared to have agreed to keep some badger culling going as a part of a back-room deal with the NFU, a fix that was later exposed by reliable sources (see here).
Meanwhile in Wales, Deputy first Minister of Wales Huw Irranca-Davis in a statement in the Senedd on 14th May 2024 (see here) articulated the superior progress on bovine TB being made in Wales without badger culling:
“But just to be clear, from 2012, which is the year before badger control policy in England, to 2023, on the latest published data, the herd incidence in England decreased from 9.8 to 7.3; it was a 26 per cent decrease. In Wales, over the same period, herd incidence decreased from 10 to 6.8. It’s a 31.3 per cent decrease. I simply put that on record—those are Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs figures, by the way—to say that we are doing things differently in Wales, in line with our programme for government, but we’re also succeeding in many ways.”
Labour’s landslide victory on 4th July heralded a further rollercoaster of events. Within six weeks it announced that the new government did not intend to pursue the policy of ‘targeted’ culling, making the key legal challenge to the consultation unnecessary. Instead it planned to work on a “refreshed bovine TB control badger strategy”.
An important new extensive re-evaluation of the Randomised Badger Culling Trial was published in Nature Scientific Reports by Prof Paul Torgerson with others, on 15th July, shaking the foundation stone of Government policy since 2011. It provided further and highly extensive evidence that the role of badgers in bovine TB in cattle was fatally misconstrued, and the problems had not been spotted over 20 years ago (see here).
Throughout 2023 and 2024 the Oxfordshire Badger Group (OBG), with support from others, had tried to initiate discussion of the RBCT design and findings with Oxford University, but reported a wall of reluctance or silence. Around 7,000 badgers have been shot in Oxfordshire so far. On 18th July OBG presented a petition with over 50,000 signatures to Oxford University School of Biology in central Oxford. OBG called on Oxford University to own what it called “Your Bloody Science” and asked them to “Speak out against badger extermination”, (see here). There was apparently no meaningful contribution to the debate from the Oxford RBCT scientists. Also in July, Betty Badger (AKA Mary Barton, a member of the Herts and Middlesex badger Group) marked her marathon 8 years of protesting badger culling outside Defra’s main London office (every Thursday), switching attention towards the broken promises made to her over the previous year that she “wouldn’t be standing there after the election” (see here
).
On 21st August two new papers were published by Mills et al. in Royal Society Open Science, largely repeating the analyses in Torgerson et al 2024, but coming to a different conclusion (see here & here). Further concerns by Torgerson et al were preprinted on September 20th in BioRxive (see here) and the matter will continue into 2025.
On 23rd August, the BBC2 documentary ‘Brian May – The Badgers, the Farmers, and Me’ was aired, illustrating how the badger cull policy implemented since 2013 has failed farmers completely (see here).
There followed a tirade of rather ill-founded and rushed accusations and complaints by multiple members of the usually secretive BTB Partnership (see here) on X (formerly Twitter), presumably reflecting the collective tribal response of government hirelings. The documentary showed how, following the cull, rates of bTB infection and consequent numbers of cattle slaughtered are in some areas no better than they were in 2013, and in other areas they are worse than ever. See here and the graph below for Gloucestershire cull area 1 that is central to government (APHA) publications; they tell the story. The real culprit, as exposed by leading cattle vet Dick Sibley, is the limitations of the standard SICCT and Gamma testing procedure and constraints over using newer tests to detect the hidden disease reservoir in herds. The work from the Save Me Trust supported case study farms in England and Wales and all pointed in one direction – the misunderstanding of disease control needs by the Government professionals and contractors in charge. Farmers in south west England were beginning to recognize how far away from real solutions the Government and their representatives have been taking them. Both with the trading of herds not properly freed from bTB infection, and the false narrative around badger transmission. The documentary represents the most decisive moment in bovine TB control since the epidemic was created nearly 25 years ago following a long period with lax testing.
On 30th August, intent to refresh the bovine TB control badger strategy was announced:
“Government to end badger cull with new TB eradication strategy”,
although only in relation to a bit of proposed tinkering around with badgers, as follows:
- A new survey starting in December 2024 to try to estimate cull impacts. This will be a sample of signs of sett activity in culled areas and conclude generally that badgers are highly mobile and recolonise quickly, but give no reliable indication of numbers.
- Surveillance of the prevalence of bTB in found dead or culled badgers and deer. To show, as expected, and previously shown, that bTB remains in wildlife when the general countryside remains infected by infected cattle trading, and afterwards for several years. This seems to be aimed at somehow informing further misguided culling and vaccination efforts, based on outmoded thinking.
- Establish a new Badger Vaccinator Field Force: As Defra fall even further and hopelessly behind its badger vaccination targets of 2023 and now 2024, accelerating potential future costs, this ambition looks as futile as it is a pointless exercise. No one thinks it can work, no one wants to do it, no one wants to pay for it. There is no evidence it can contribute.
- Badger vaccination study to rapidly analyse the effect of badger vaccination on the incidence of TB in cattle: There would be nothing rapid about this and for it to have any value would be a long term, hugely expensive exercise, with controls. The flawed anticipation is that it will “give farmers greater confidence that doing so will have a positive effect on their cattle.” This just illustrates how misguided and out of touch the same-old Defra/APHA staff and advisors remain.
This was very disappointing to say the least. And whilst there was a clearly stated intention to stop culling badgers, shockingly that would not now happen before the end of the current Parliament (2029), leaving the door open for culling to continue with the next Government. The plans proposed five more years of badger culling and to everyone’s disbelief, even a new cull area in Cumbria north of Penrith. Where unwise cattle trading has created a small number of breakdowns in a zone called Hotspot 29: around 1,000 mostly healthy badgers are to be shot over a wide area (see here and below), with hundreds shot this autumn. It was almost as if Defra/APHA staff wanted to appease the NFU with a “badger culling business as usual” promise no matter what independent reports or the new politicians said. Such is the grip of vested interest on civil servants.
And so in September, the badger culling season under a Labour administration got into full swing in the High Risk, Edge and Low Risk Areas of England for a 12th year, to kill (often in a cruel way) around 15,000 more mostly completely healthy adult and cub badgers. This will bring the total reported killed since 2013 close to the 250,000 mark.
On 24th October APHA’s “Year End Descriptive Epidemiology Reports” for Bovine TB control were published online for the Edge Area counties of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, East Sussex, Hampshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Warwickshire. Progress is no longer on target for any of these areas, apparently due to inadequate funding for disease control following Brexit cutbacks (see here and here).
Published on 25th October, Science and Politics, a book by by Ian Boyd appeared to try to distance the author (Defra Chief Scientific Advisor 2012-2019) from his pivotal role in convincing farmers that badgers needed to be culled (see Boyd’s conceptual model below). His role in encouraging the badger cull roll-out was exposed in court copies of internal Defra emails in 2016. This, despite his self-confession on Civil Service tribalism, having maneuvered in the ‘golden cage’ to deliver ‘Boyd’s cull’ (see here).
As the year wound down, the Oxfordshire Badger Group supported a scientific seminar, in Oxford, delivered by Prof. Paul Torgerson on 18th November: key RBCT academics together with Defra & APHA officials were invited to discuss the science and statistics but all declined.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (Natalie Bennett) hosted a special meeting on Government bovine TB policy at Millbank in Westminster on 19th November, with presentations by Prof Paul Torgerson and veterinarian Dick Sibley. The meeting was well attended from the Lords and Commons, but all Defra and APHA officials and staff invited to attend declined the invitation (see Vet Record: here).
On 28th November, the Northern Ireland Chief Veterinary Officer Review of Bovine Tuberculosis in Northern Ireland (prepared by cattle breeder Brian Dooher) (see here) was published in advance of publication of a consultation document over policy expected in the spring. This followed the fiasco over the last consultation, where the economic case was not made available and the consultation was determined invalid by the courts thanks to a NI Badger Group/Wild Justice legal challenge. BTB is getting worse in NI and badger blame rhetoric has reached fever pitch, based in part on misuse of the February APHA paper, and DEFRA’s position claiming that badger culling can be shown to work. DAERA and independent advisors will need to be sure to produce an accurate document this time if the previous failure is not to be repeated, as sadly looks increasingly likely.
On 3rd December, Rob Pownall of Protect The Wild launched a parliamentary petition to end the English badger cull. Standing at around 30,000 signatures at the time of writing, the petition calls for “an immediate end to the cull and the implementation of cattle focused measures to control bTB, rather than what we see as scapegoating wildlife.” As the petition points out, research that has been “peer reviewed and published, shows no evidence that culling badgers reduces confirmed bTB in cattle. Over 230,000 badgers — many healthy — have been killed, disrupting ecosystems without solid scientific justification”. Please add your name to this petition here.
On 13th December Tom Langton delivered a presentation entitled “Veterinary Science, Uncertainty and Politics: TB and wildlife” at the Annual Veterinary Public Health Conference held at 
Vetsuisse Faculty at Zurich University. This looked at the flawed assumptions made back in the 1970’s that led to badgers being wrongly labelled as a ‘self-perpetuating bTB reservoir‘, on to field trials that tried to show a ‘bTB perturbation effect’, and statistics chosen to ‘prove‘ this as a way to stop culling. And the uncertainty, peer pressure, confirmation bias and reputational defence that has followed on as a consequence.
What can be expected in 2025? Difficult to say, but with a Labour government now in charge, we have to hope for at least some meaningful dialogue on the scientific, financial and ethical considerations that have just not been heard over the last 12 years. We are looking for more than the ‘same-old’ broken policy and tired old arguments.
Thanks again to the hundreds of active supporters who have generously helped to fund legal work and provided information, analysis and support in so many ways this year. You have surely contributed towards seeing off widespread targeted culling this year. Next year we will continue to demand rapid change in approach to bovine TB policy, a change that is scientifically evidenced, and that will, at last, start to benefit farmers, cows, badgers and the public. This change must start with meaningful dialogue.
