Tag Archives: jeremy clarkson

Summer news roundup

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

Zeichner visit to Gatcombe Farm

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

Godfray Review report postponed

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

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

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

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

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

Badger Vaccination

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

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

Jeremy Clarkson’s herd is OTF-S

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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