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2025 News round-up

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January

On 30th January 2025, Defra issued Terms of Reference for a ‘comprehensive new bovine TB review’, as part of a refreshed bTB eradication strategy, first announced in August 2024 (see here). A panel for the new review, was to be chaired, as previously, by Professor Sir Charles Godfray. It was his work (with others) and his advice that was used to help establish and maintain badger culling from 2013. Godfray, rooted at Oxford University, has long been associated with those designing and undertaking aspects of the controversial Randomised Badger Culling Trial (1998 – 2005). Indeed, he chaired its so-called ‘independent’ statistical audit (Godfray et al 2004).

Following discovery of serious statistical irregularities in the key 2006 RBCT proactive badger culling publication in more recent years, lead author Christl Donnelly, Professor of Applied Statistics at Oxford University, recused herself from the panel. But surprisingly, she was replaced by a recently arrived colleague Professor Sir Bernard Silverman FRS, Emeritus Professor of Statistics, also at Oxford University.

Other panel members, of what later in the year became known as the Strategy review ‘refresh’ or ‘update’, were the same as in the 2018 review: Professor Glyn Hewinson CBE of Aberystwyth University, Professor Michael Winter OBE University of Exeter and Professor James Wood OBE of University of Cambridge. So once again, it was largely the same set of academics as appointed in 2017, looking at the science in which they personally have a historical interest and potentially, future stake. With the new findings to be read alongside the earlier review, despite much of the 2018 material being superfluous or out of date.

Defra refused to adequately address multiple protests against the panel  appointments for  ‘conflict of interest’, simply saying those concerned were ‘esteemed’ and ‘distinguished’; that was enough for Defra. They later said the checking system relied on members own self-referral.

February

On February 15th, Prof Ian Boyd,  past Defra Chief Scientific Advisor (as Badger culling was developed) and  major influence in the culling of over 250,000 mostly healthy badgers), was the guest of Sir Charles Godfray in Oxford, for Boyd’s book promotion (Science and Politics). Bovine TB and badgers was the most mentioned topic, but the wider issue was of politics distorting the scientific process in general. Boyd’s main thrust appeared to be to point a finger at politicians (‘charlatans’ he calls them in the book) and also at the Royal Society. 

Boyd suggested that there is continuing pressure to produce results to fit a political agenda, mistakes are commonplace, they continue to be made, and the way to prevent the same thing from happening in the future is far from clear. He wished he had known more about Bovine TB before taking on his role. You can read more about who said what here.

March-May

Spring 2025 saw new scientific papers on badger vaccination, the Test / Vaccinate / Remove (TVR) approach and even badger contraception. This flurry of papers from government scientists seemed to be looking to satisfy the politicians stated aim to switch from badger culling to non-lethal methods. But with TVR lurking in the background as a potential closet return to culling.  

Robertson et al (2025) claimed that “Modelling studies evaluating different strategies for controlling TB in badgers predict that badger vaccination will reduce TB prevalence in badger populations and lead to corresponding reductions in cattle herd disease incidence.” But without direct evidence and yet again stretching and trying to normalize APHA’s efforts to cause-argue policy from equivocal science, dubious assumptions and partisan models. Along exactly the same lines (and almost as if to provide Boyd fresh evidence for his government science take-down), Smith & Budgey (2025) reported that a “combined approach of vaccination and selective culling (TVR) based on test results may give a more robust method of disease management than just vaccination on its own.”

The preprint by Palphramand et al (2025) (to be published in Science Direct Jan 2026) suggests that “co-administration of BCG vaccine and and GonaCon (a contraceptive) enhances the protective effect of the booster vaccination.” This is research work carried out on a small captive population of badgers caught from the wild.

June

Supplementary badger culling was authorized for a further year on June 1st. Natural England‘s scientific rationale for licensing did not take into account the Torgerson et al (2024) preprint which highlighted serious statistical issues with the Mills et al (I & II) (2024) upon which they relied. In doing so, it continued with its policy of ignoring key stakeholders and relevant evidence and simply obeying Defra’s mandate to carry on culling thousands more badgers, despite mounting evidence against it’s efficacy.

On 11th June, The Royal Society published Torgerson et al (2025), undermining the RBCT conclusions of a disease benefit from proactive badger culling. This effectively removed any credible scientific rationale for it. Defra did not respond to the new publication. You can read more about this paper & its significance as a watershed moment for British biological sciences here.

On June 12th, a day later, the BBC reported that “Farmers to get support vaccinating badgers”, confirming that badgers would continue to take substantial blame for bovine TB in cattle. Clearly, Steve Reed, Daniel Zeichner, and the Defra Ministers continue to be misled by their personnel who are unable to admit (due perhaps to responsibility for financial waste and pride / position), that badger culling has been both unnecessary and worthless.

July


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

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

Junior Minister Sue Hayman replied for the government 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 all the Cornish badger vaccination project can hope to show is whether Cornish farmers are prepared to engage.

August

In late July/early August it was widely reported that Jeremy Clarkson’s Diddly Squat Farm in Oxfordshire (subject of TV show ‘Clarkson’s Farm’) had gone down with bTB reactors, having bought cattle from sources with relatively recent breakdowns.

Whilst The Daily Telegraph foolishly speculated that “the presenter was unable to stop transmission of the bacteria from badger to cow”, epidemiologist James Wood on Farming Today said “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.” Clarkson expressed doubt about testing and a need for information and then went silent as several of his stock were destroyed. No doubt Defra were nervous of the high profile of the story, and aware of how its flawed bTB testing system could be more widely exposed. See our blog on the story here.

September

In September, the delayed (due in June) Godfray review update was published (see here). Key points:

  1. It confirms (page 75) in a massive ‘wake-up’ finding, that Torgerson et al (2024 & 2025) papers do show that the key 2006 RBCT proactive badger culling paper by Donnelly and others in Nature journal got the modelling hopelessly wrong. This has massive implications for a wide number of papers and official  reports that have used that paper’s calculations to build further models and create policy and financial estimates.
  2. Remarkably, it went to the lengths of producing its own new (binomial) model, claiming a culling benefit, but with lower statistical significance (it has gone from P < 0.005 to P < 0.05). However, there were mistakes and multiple issues with this model that were outlined in a new preprint by Prof Paul Torgerson (here), also posted September 2025. There has been no subsequent response from Defra. The authors have made some rudimentary remarks about agreeing to differ and the differences being subtle, which they certainly are not.
  3. The manner in which the new model was checked before publication is subject to close scrutiny due to suspected irregularities.
  4. The “bTB perturbation effect hypothesis” (used to justify culling healthy badgers) became un-evidenced, as it is statistically unsupported by Godfray’s model (as well as Torgerson’s models), undoing the RBCT conclusions even more comprehensively (see here) and triggering calls for retraction of key papers (see here).
  5. It failed to deliberate on the ‘confirmed’ versus ‘unconfirmed’ continuum in the identification of reactors, that was clarified in 2018, but not by the 2018 review. This obfuscates on what is a central issue, both in bTB testing and badger culling science. The panel just feebly recommended further research. This is despite Natural England formally asking the Godfray panel to focus on it.
  6. It inexcusably repeated errors in Birch et al (2024), notably the under-declaration of interferon gamma use (see here and here) which was introduced at the same time as badger culling and makes it impossible to separate the effects of badger culling from cattle measures. It also mistakenly claims it evaluated “before-after differences in treated units with those in untreated units” which is a very worrying mis-reading of the methods. Birch was a time series study, with no comparison of separate culled and unculled areas.
  7. It uses an unpublished report that the panel asked specially to be made available (Robertson et al (2025) to claim that Langton et al (2022) may not have detected a disease benefit had there been one. The unconvincing efforts in this preprint have been addressed here (Langton 2025).

October

On 13th October, there was a much awaited Westminster Hall debate (view here) on ending badger culling, precipitated by a 100,000 parliamentary petition coordinated by the successful lobbyists and wild animal protection advocates Protect the Wild. Although the two-hour session was a massive improvement on previous dreadful badger cull debates (reflecting the cull of dinosaur politicians lost in the 2024 general election), it remained (perhaps not surprisingly) ‘behind the curve’ on recently published science.  Happily, the majority of voices spoke earnestly about a wish to stop badger culling and address TB testing failures and to manage the disease effectively. Minister Angela Eagle reaffirmed Labours commitment to ending the badger cull by the end of this Parliament, with the possibility of all culls ending in 2026 following a review of the last cull area (no. 73) in Cumbria in the New Year. However, it is likely that Defra will do everything in its power to prevent this, via introducing TVR pilots.

Also in October 2025, Prof. Torgerson published a letter in Veterinary Record (see here) reporting his request for a  retraction of the Donnelly et al (2006) paper by Nature journal.

November & December

Meanwhile in Northern Ireland, a Parliamentary question by Miss Michelle McIlveen (from the DUP) tabled on November 18th made it clear that a €6.4m investment for a cross-border pilot regional cooperation programme on tackling bovine TB had been secured, with use of TVR as an experiment. This was leaked by the Ulster Farmers Union who wanted intensive badger culling and exposed DAERA’s attempt to instigate lethal interventions, despite previous undertakings not to do so without consultation.

On 2nd December Andrew Muir (Minister of DAERA of Northern Ireland), responding to a further Parliamentary Question about this funding replied that “Wildlife Intervention is a key part of that plan, which is why we will consult on wildlife intervention options in the spring of next year.”

So it looks like badger interventions are part of the bTB control plans in Northern Ireland, going forwards with a clumsy attempt to use TVR as a route towards wider culling. This is the approach already shown to be unnecessary by correct use of RBCT data, the post 2013 industry culling in England and long term badger culling and vaccination in the Republic of Ireland.

A letter published 13th December in Vet Record (here) raised questions concerning the continuation of badger blame following criticisms of the recent Godfray review. A response from the Godfray review panel was published alongside, repeating their view that “reasonable people can disagree about the best way to analyse complex data“. They remain, however, like Defra, unwilling to enter into a discussion on any of the analyses.

The Badger Trust / Wild Justice Judicial Review hearing against Natural England (on an incorrect reason for granting 2024 Supplementary badger cull licences) listed to start on 16th December was postponed due to “a court administrative error”. The case will now be relisted “sometime in 2026”.

And there has been much more going on, bubbling along beneath the surface that is work in progress, and that we will report on when we are able. We had hoped for better in 2025, with the science supporting badger culling now completely undone. But it looks as if it will take a little longer before the fundamental importance of the new publications is understood and accepted.

Thanks go to….

As in previous years, Badger Crowd would like to thank the hundreds of people who have worked together to support this years work to expose and halt the cruel and needless killing of badgers as a part of ineffective livestock disease control. As the mass culling of in the region of 6,000 badgers in 2025/6 is completed at the end of January 2026, there is still no formal recognition from Defra that this has been one of their biggest wildlife blunders.

It is thanks to all of you that we have collectively been able to protest, campaign, lobby, publish and report, and we can only hope that next year finally sees some truth and honesty from those who would seek to cover up the sins of the past. Particular thanks are due to all at Protect The Wild for their relentless public awareness work, especially the successful government petition and Westminster debate, backed by the general public. Also to Betty Badger (aka Mary Barton) and friends who maintained the Thursday vigil outside Defra offices, protesting the injustice (see article in the Spectator). Thanks also to the regular forums of the national ‘Voices for Badgers‘ network, the tireless Oxford Badger Group and so many others who have campaigned, donated and supported. And not to forget those who put endless hours in to protect badgers and their setts from multiple threats in their own areas. A massive shout out too to all those in the field, unblocking illegally infilled badger setts and those opposing snares. New legislation could be on the way – we certainly hope so. Thanks to all for your strength and determination.

It was the combined care and effort of all those taking a stand, no matter how large or small, that is helping bring mass badger culling to an end in England. We must now continue our opposition to culling in Ireland. We must ensure that accurate science now guides policy away from unnecessary, unverifiable and cruel protected species interventions. Badger culling must not be allowed to continue or ever happen again. There is much work still to be done, but the continued determination and energy of so many can prevail.

Are both sides of the badger cull argument ‘mining the data’?

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It has been claimed that the disagreement about the Randomised Badger Culling Trials (RBCT), and what that central study tells us about whether badger culling can reduce bovine TB breakdowns in cattle, is a result of ‘data mining’ from both sides. That is, both sides are selecting the methods of analysis that give them the result they want. Is this a true representation of the current situation which sees different analyses giving opposite results? Or is the claim just a bit of a smokescreen?

Basically, there are two models that are used to claim that badger culling produces a disease control benefit to cattle;

1. Donnelly et al 2006 produced the only Poisson model (there are many others available) that says badger culling ‘worked’ with around a 20% benefit (P 0.005%).

2. In the recent Godfray review of evidence, Bernard Silverman downgraded the Donnelly model and produced the only binomial model (of 4) that indicates badger culling had an effect, with around a 17% benefit (P 0.05%). A similar effect but at a much weaker level.

However, the Donnelly model did not correctly adjust the data for the number of herds in each trial area, nor the ‘time at risk’. And the recent Silverman analysis did not correctly adjust for ‘time at risk’. So neither analysis correctly adjusts for exposure to disease during the experiment.

Professor Torgerson’s reanalysis of the RBCT data in 2024, published In Nature Scientific Reports, reviewed a wider range of analyses in accordance with veterinary principles, the most appropriate/best fitting of which (based on model rating criteria and parsimony) suggested the superior models showed no benefit from badger culling.

If there was a convincing effect from what is a relatively small amount of data it would be visible in most or all of the analyses undertaken. Two selected models that have not been properly adjusted for important variables compare poorly to stronger ones that don’t. Claiming a benefit from badger culling from the RBCT is not verifiable because the claimed effect is not consistent. The correctly specified models consistently show badger culling produces no visible effect on disease in cattle.

For those wishing to read more about the recent reanalyses of the RBCT, our post on the 11th June Royal Society Open Science paper shows how the original 2006 analysis and subsequent attempts to support it were flawed and even ‘naive’, and our post from September 17th outlines statistical issues with new analyses in the recent Godfray review.

So the answer is that there is no data mining going on, at least not by those seeking to independently check the data. Just a thorough review of the best statistical way to understand the simple data involved, using the kind of approaches that the original scientists implied that they would use.

What did The Royal Society peer-reviewer say about the new Torgerson et al (2025) paper?

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Professor Paul Torgerson


The peer-reviewer of the new scientific paper, Torgerson et al 2025,  published on June 11th is the Director of Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland (BIOSS). The paper is concerned with analysis of the Ranomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT). Below, you can see the text of the review together with the authors responses, as addressed to the editor.  Also highlighted (bold italics) are a few points that seem particularly important & difficult to disagree with, even if you don’t understand statistics. It should be noted that the two reviewers of the Mills et al. (2024) papers that Torgerson et al. is rebutting, declined to submit a review of the new Torgerson paper. In other words, they praised the two Mills et al papers, recommended them for acceptance, but declined the opportunity to defend their decision by explaining their thinking on Torgerson et al (2024 & 2025). They remain anonymous, which is interesting from an integrity perspective.

These communications are available from a link (Review History) on the online paper.

Torgerson: The reviewer has made a number of comments. We have addressed these where necessary and made some amendments to the text. We would also like to thank the reviewer for these helpful comments which we hope have improved our manuscript.

Reviewer: Comment. Overall it seems there is strong disagreement over competing data analyses on what is already a highly contentious issue, which has significant implications in terms of ecology and agriculture. I have been asked to comment on one small part of the ongoing discussion, which I will do – however, my overall, strongest recommendation is that, given the importance of the underlying issue (both scientifically and politically) that a proper investigation be conducted to establish an agreed position involving all parties. A continuing to-and-fro among different sets of authors – each, I am sure, well-meaning in their own ways – serves little purpose, and there are better, more efficient and effective ways of resolving disagreements than in the pages of an academic journal.

Torgerson: The underlying issue (mass culling of largely healthy badgers across much of England and in Ireland) is the result of the original analysis by Donnelly et al, first published in Nature in 2006 and papers derived from that, and subsequent analyses. Although the merit of the analysis has been questioned, only by having alternative data analyses published in peer reviewed journals is it possible for the UK Governments to consider amending the policy. Nevertheless, we have contacted Donnelly et al previously in an attempt to meet and to find common ground, but our attempts were rebuffed. In order to give the reader a clear idea of the applied implications of both our re-evaluation and the peer review comments, we have added some text to the conclusions: “Accordingly a very substantial number of publications that rest extensively or completely on RBCT statistical analyses may require major qualification or retraction. The justification for lethal control of badgers to-date appears to have been based upon basic statistical oversight.” Also there is a reproducibility crisis in science. Therefore it is important for these issues to be published as we believe they provide an exemplar of a major driver to the reproducibility crisis and misdirection of disease epidemic management.

Badger Crowd Comment: A scientific seminar and evening presentation on the work of Paul Torgerson and his team (then a pre-print) was organised in Oxford in November 2024 in order to allow debate with the RBCT scientists. All declined the invitation. DEFRA and APHA sent no representatives. Natural England sent one staff member but gave no feedback. Badger Crowd very much welcomes the reviewers suggestion to hold a “proper investigation…to establish an agreed position involving all parties.”

Reviewer: Comment 1) Section 2.1. I agree with the authors of the current contribution here that use of an offset here is likely a requirement, and that the comments from the Mills et al. (4) are naïve at best – it isn’t helpful to think of an offset as equivalent to setting a regression coefficient to 1.0, as of course the issue is that this is a log-linear scale and the point is that (under the Poisson) we assume proportional rates. I agree that it does not seem to make sense that the herd breakdowns vary only very slightly (the parameter value of 0.04) with the number of herds, although I would caution here only that it is possible some other variable/term in the model might be related to the number of herds, hence suppressing the parameter value (when including number of herds as a regression term rather than as an offset) owing to collinearity.

Torgerson: This is quite possible, and the collinearity is likely to be between the co variates of “triplet” and “baseline herds at risk”. Hence the motivation to explore the results of models where triplet was removed (which always resulted in a considerable reduction in AICc). Although it is not clear if the reviewer required a response to this statement, we have inserted the following text into the manuscript “The removal of “triplet” may remove any hidden effects possibly due to collinearity with number of herds, as well as substantially reducing the number of covariates and hence largely eliminate the issue of over fitting.”

Reviewer: Comment 2) I have personally written (Brewer et al, 2016 – https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.12541 ) about the dangers of relying on the theoretical distinctions between AIC/AICc and BIC, so it should be no surprise that I share the current authors’ suspicions on the preference expressed in Mills et al. (4) for BIC. Also, why are the AICc values for Models 1 and 3 so much higher than the null model in Table 1? Is this just a feature of the small-sample correction? Otherwise I would not expect this at all (if I’m understand what the null model is, correctly); in the absence of other explanations here, given the high number of parameters in models 1 and 3 I would suspect poor model fitting with inflated variances due to collinearity. So, I agree with the current authors here, on the basis of the evidence in front of me (Sections 2.2+2.3, Table 1, supplementary material).

Torgerson: This issue is well taken. This was part of our arguments. Although perhaps not completely clear. We have edited the relevant text which now reads “Brewer et al (16) have written about the dangers or relying on theoretical distinctions between AIC/AICc and BIC. Nevertheless, Mills et al. (4,5) state “…a wide array of statistical techniques and study periods allows us to make robust conclusions regarding the effects of proactive badger culling which are informed by consistent scientific evidence from trial data, irrespective of which approach to statistical inference is taken.” This is demonstrably untrue. The analysis of “confirmed breakdowns” (OTFW) show that results are highly dependent on the approach to statistical inference and information criteria used. However, absence of any cull effect on the incidence of bTB, when total breakdowns are considered, is robust, irrespective of statistical method.”

Reviewer: Comment 3) The discussion on Bayesian models claims that the authors of Mills et al. (4) made coding errors. I do feel that then Mills et al. should be able to examine and (if relevant) correct these errors, and formally issue a correction in the pages of the journal. Otherwise, I don’t feel I have sufficient information to comment further here.

Torgerson:  Here the reader needs to refer to both the coding on GitHub, which is where Mills et al have made their statistical code available and the code we have given in the supplementary material. We give an example here.
In Mills et al, they claimed an offset was used with the following R code:
rs1aB←stan_glm.nb(Incidence~Treatment+log(hdyrsrisk),+log(Hist3yr), offset = log(hdyrsrisk), prior_intercept=normal(0,10), prior=normal(0,10), data = rbctconf, refresh=0)
Here you will note (in red) that log(hdyrsrisk) appears twice in the code, both as an explanatory variable and an offset. The effect of this is to shift the parameters of log(hrdyrsrisk) by a value of 1, whilst other parameter values remain unchanged, thus effectively having no offset.
The correct code if a parameter value is to be fixed as an offset is:
rs1aB<-stan_glm.nb(Incidence~Treatment+log(Hist3yr), offset = log(hdyrsrisk), prior_intercept=normal(0,10), prior=normal(0,10), data = rbctconf, refresh=0) or alternatively:
 rs1aB<-stan_glm.nb(Incidence~Treatment+offset(log(hdyrsrisk))+log(Hist3yr), prior_intercept=normal(0,10), prior=normal(0,10), data = rbctconf, refresh=0)
We refer the reader to our supplementary material where it is fully explained together with the other errors in the code of Mills et al.

Reviewer: I agree with the current authors’ concerns on the statistical audit. I would go so far as to say that, given the important of the topic of this discussion, any audit should be carried out openly and transparently.

Torgerson: We have added short text at the end of section 4 “ It is important that trials include an audit that is open and transparent.”

Reviewer: Comment 5) Section 5 on the neighboring area study – again, from what I can see here, I would broadly agree with the concerns of the current authors.

Torgerson: No response required

Reviewer: Comment. 6) To clarify; I have no issue with the modelling of counts, as the use of a Poisson-form log-linear model is, in effect, modelling rates. To be more precise, I would suggest that the problem is not that Mills et al. (4) modelled counts, but that they did not properly scale those counts by use of an appropriate offset – and again, I am saying this on the basis of the evidence of the current work (only).

Torgerson: Here the reviewer appears to be agreeing with our approach by using the offset. But for clarity so readers can see the derivation of the offset (in the Poisson log-linear model) in our previous manuscript where there derivation is explained. Thus we have inserted the text “The mathematical derivation of the offset is explained in our previous manuscript on this issue (3).”

Reviewer: Comment. 7) Finally, I would like to address the quotation from Donnelly (16): “the suggestion of requiring independent replication of specific statistical analyses as a general check before publication seems not merely unnecessary but a misuse of relatively scarce expertise”. The point to me here is not that work should be “replicated” as such, but that work should be verifiable. The authors of Mills et al. (4) have apparently made their work – at least that related to the 2024 journal papers – available openly, and this is the key; openness and transparency are vital. I would even go as far to say that, in such a contentious area as this, it is naïve to imagine that a single analysis by a particular group of scientists should be seen as sufficient.

Torgerson: Yes we agree, which is one of the issues with the original RBCT proactive cull statistical findings published in 2006, which was led by Donnelly: it was a single analysis by a particular group of scientists, and the Mills et al papers are also led by Donnelly et al. We think this is obvious and it should be verifiable. Nevertheless we have modified the text surrounding the quotation of Donnelly (16). It now reads: The position of Donnelly (17) that “the suggestion of requiring independent replication of specific statistical analyses as a general check before publication seems not merely unnecessary but a misuse of relatively scarce expertise”, needs revisiting. This case underlines the need not only for rigorous checks of statistical analysis but also validation of the statistical models and assumptions used within submitted manuscripts to verify them.

Badger Crowd Comment: For the last 6 months, Sir Charles Godfray and his ‘expert’ panel have been reviewing badger cull and bovine TB science published since 2018. Godfray was involved in the RBCT audit, the 2013 restatement of badger cull science and the 2018 science review. In other words, the single analysis (Donnelly 2006) that has supported the badger cull policy is being reviewed by (largely) the same ‘particular’ group of scientists who have been associated with the work for nearly 20 years. Donnelly herself has been ‘recused’, but has been replaced by another Oxford statistician from the same department. There is no outside scrutiny, and there is a case that there has been no “proper investigation ….to establish an agreed position involving all parties” as recommended by the peer reviewer. A proper investigation would be free from conflict of interest. Defra have refused to address this issue over the last six months.

In case you missed the point of all this, the new Torgerson paper shows how for multiple reasons that there is no evidence that culling badger delivers a disease benefit of bovine TB control in cattle herds. The current ‘closed shop’ of science at DEFRA has fallen flat in the past and should not be allowed to continue. They are selecting the scientists and science that they want to suit a civil service agenda and they don’t want to admit that they have been wrong for very many years. It is a flagrant example of policy driven science. And everybody is losing out because of it: the public (because of the enormous costs of policy), the farmers (because it is a policy that can never achieve its aims) and the badgers – because they are being inhumanely killed in huge numbers. 

This intolerable situation cannot be allowed to continue. Badger culling must stop now, and an independent investigation or inquiry must be set up.

Bovine TB roundup 2024

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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.

Fact: Badger culling has made no visible difference to the number of annual bTB incidents  in the 2013-2021  ‘pilot’ cull area in Gloucestershire. Note 2024 has now reached 26 incidents as of 4th December.


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.

Hotspot 29. Herd breakdowns 2013-2024. Note in 2020 due to covid restrictions, cattle testing was suspended. This resulted in increased trading of diseased cattle and further infections in subsequent years. In 2022 many new enhanced tests began to address the 2021 increase in the area, with the APHA/CVO epidemiological mistake of blaming it on badgers. It is what the 2018 LRA policy calls a ‘precautionary’ measure, and is the travesty of a failed policy that Labour now perpetuates, despite promising not to. There has been a further breakdown in December 2024 making 8 breakdowns.

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). 

Ian Boyd’s Conceptual model on why badger culling is essential


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.

 

 

 

 

 

New scientific paper shows that the badger cull was never going to work

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This website has been reporting on the legal challenges to the badger culling policy and licences, and the science that has supposedly supported it since 2019. Over that time, there have been many jaw-dropping moments; government interference in peer-reviewed science, government scientists getting their data wrong in published letters, Natural England claiming that culling has no effect on ecosystems and then desperately covering their tracks in the courts. The list goes on, and the story that has unfolded remains  truly shocking.

Professor Paul Torgerson, Chair, Veterinary Epidemiology, University of Zurich

But an even more dramatic sequel to this long-running saga is the new scientific paper published this week in Scientific Reports by Professor Paul Torgerson and colleagues including Badger Crowd’s Tom Langton. We will be posting a video presentation that will put this new work into context and demonstrate the massive impact that it should now have on Government bovine TB policy.

Why is this new study so important?

Because the government badger cull policy rests all but entirely on the conclusions from the Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT). It is the science that DEFRA has used in court to defend their decisions to experiment with culling. The study is the original  peer-reviewed science that claims badger culling can reduce bTB in cattle; many subsequent studies are derivative from it, use the same flawed methodology, or suffer heavily from confirmation bias. I.e. they are subjective opinion that fails to prove that culling badgers causes disease reduction. However, benefits are claimed from culling when any benefits are, in reality likely from cattle measures. This is because such benefits are “predicted” from the results of the RBCT.

What does the new study say?

The new study re-examines data from the RBCT experiment using a range of statistical models. It concludes that most standard analytical options did not show any evidence to support an effect of badger culling on bovine TB in cattle. The statistical model selected for use in the original study in 2006 was one of the few models that did show an effect from badger culling. However, various criteria suggest that the original model was not an optimal model compared to other analytical options then available. The most likely explanation for the difference in result from the different analyses is that the RBCT proactive cull analysis ‘overfitted’ the data and used a non-standard method to control for disease exposure. The result is that the original model had a poor predictive value, i.e. it was not useful in predicting the results of badger culling. The more appropriate models in the latest study strongly suggest that badger culling does not bring about the disease reduction reported.

How might the RBCT scientists defend their decisions?

  1. The RBCT was a pre-planned analysis i.e. data was analysed in the way they said it would be before they started the trial, so it can’t be questioned.  This is not the case. There was a loosely described plan to compare rates of disease between culled and unculled areas. Their published analysis in fact compared counts of disease between culled and unculled areas. Would the conclusion of the RBCT analysis have been different  if incidence rates had been analysed correctly? Yes it would. Even if the data had been analysed according to any ‘pre-plan’, this would not preclude subsequent re-analysis using correct and more appropriate methods, except you might not do it if you believed rates had been used as was suggested in the paper.
  2. There is nothing wrong with using the model to calculate the number of herds (exposure). There may be circumstances in which a model may be sensibly used to calculate exposure. However, the original model used suggests that bTB herd incidents (a standard measure of new disease) is independent of the number of herds in a study area. That is, if the number of  herds in an area is doubled, the incidence does not change. This is not credible. Not least because the RBCT report (Table 5.4) showed that breakdowns doubled in cull and control areas over the period of study.
  3. You are just model dredging; i.e. you are just picking out the model that says what you want. The new study re-examined RBCT data using a range of statistical models (22 in total). Most of these show no evidence to support an effect of badger culling on bTB in cattle. The statistical model chosen by the RBCT study was one of the few models that did show an effect, but when tested in an accredited way, it is not an optimal model. The new paper is not guilty of  “model dredging”, it is the result of an attempt to find a robust analytical method that could support the claims of the RBCT

Why has this not been picked up before?

It does seem remarkable that the original RBCT a) got through peer review, and b) has not been challenged since. One reason might be the rather casual use of the words ‘rate’ and ‘count’ in the original paper, which implies that rate has been used in the model, whereas in fact an epidemiologically non-standard method was used to calculate a rate. Supplementary information in the original paper showed standard calculated ‘rates’ and the assumption could have been made that these were what was used in the model. They were not.

Interestingly, in the journal Biostatistics in 2010, two authors of the 2006 paper discussed approaches to using a range of statistical methods on a data set to compare their performance, and the choosing of a planned statistical approach that best complimented the subject matter.  They proposed that selection of a specific statistical approach may involve ’subtle considerations about the interplay between subject-matter and statistical aspects and the detailed nature of the data and its compilation.’ And with respect to the peer-review of results, they contend quite boldly: ‘the suggestion of requiring independent replication of specific statistical analyses as a general check before publication seems not merely unnecessary but a misuse of relatively scarce expertise.’

This may go some way towards understanding how problems with the original analysis were not picked up for such a long time. And it goes some way to explaining why there is such a reproducibility crisis in science.

The paper is open access. You can read it here.