A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a time in my childhood when I and my brothers and sister played among the badger setts and chestnut trees and elder bushes of Dadnor Bottoms. We and the badgers played in the same place. As well as seeing evidence of the serious business of badgering, we knew there were cubs there in the summer evenings, and occasionally we heard them play fighting below ground. We paid a lot of attention to their doings – we could see what they had been eating when we passed their lavatories, especially when the blackberries were ripe. We believed that they took their hay and bracken bedding out into the sunshine in the summer, and brought it back in when it was aired, a bit like our mother. We followed tracks so far in that sandy soil that we found other setts miles away, and concluded that badgers were sociable and visited their neighbours, though I’m fairly sure now that this is not true and that that their lavatories are at the boundaries of territories that they respect and defend. We found their skulls, and their scratching posts, we saw their diggings for bluebells and wasp nests. Once I thought I’d found an old leather ball, that turned out to be a hedgehog, eaten so thoroughly by the badger, starting by forcing its jaws into the ‘entrance’ to the tightly curled hedgehog, and eating it so cleanly that all that was left was a partial leather sphere with the spines on the inside.
So our lives were intertwined with those of the badgers, and I supposed even then that they knew about us, heard us, smelled us and became accustomed to us as part of their world too. Once we built a log bridge across the stream and laid wet clay on it, and found paw prints in the clay that showed that they had started to use the bridge we built for them. A rare privilege, it seems now, to have shared the space so amicably and yet so mysteriously with these creatures.
I have not spent as much time as I ought, thinking about the badger cull. I have to balance the need to be informed about what is happening to the natural world, and the duty to have the courage to know what we are doing to the world, and to fight it where I can, while protecting myself from the pain the knowledge causes. So when a good friend showed me the article in the local paper that seemed to be saying that the badger cull was ending soon, I grew a little braver and started to try to research the situation and talk to a few blessed eco-warriors.
The piece I wrote started from a too uncritical acceptance of the newspaper reports that the cull would end in 2022, and I went on to speculate about why DEFRA would continue with the very questionable cull if they were going to stop it so soon anyway. I think my speculations about the motives of politicians weren’t too far off. But where I went wrong was in accepting the basic premise of the various news reports, that the cull was to end soon. Nothing, it turns out, could be further from the truth.
Writers using the internet should have an absolute duty to tell the truth. If, as in this case, I have been misled by wily politicians and lazy journalism into thinking the cull was coming to an end, and if I have misled my readers, I think I have a duty to try to correct myself. Unfortunately the truth is not very comfortable.
On 27 January the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) published ‘consultation proposals on how to eradicate (bovine TB) in England’. On the surface it seemed that they had noted the recommendations of the Godfray Review of March 2020, and even possibly taken into account some of the views of those opposed to the badger cull. Their three ‘top priorities’ were now described as ‘accelerating work to develop a deployable cattle vaccine’, ‘evolving the wildlife control policy, by beginning to phase out intensive badger culling in the next few years and gradually replacing it with government supported badger vaccination’ although culling would remain an option, and ‘improving diagnostic testing to root out bTB more effectively, with deployment of more sensitive tests for surveillance supported by greater use of on-farm restriction of cattle with inconclusive test results.’
These developments seem, on the surface, to suggest a move towards accepting the scientific evidence, the moral arguments, and public opinion, and away from placating the farming lobby.
In March 2020 the government briefed journalists that ‘intensive badger culling would be phased out and replaced with badger vaccination’. It allegedly signalled a ‘seismic shift’ in the government’s thinking and the media ran with stories about an end to the badger cull. ‘The news was picked up by every major media outlet and clearly demonstrates the public interest in stopping the badger cull’ (Patrick Barkham, the Guardian). But the Government was disingenuous. Following this ‘news’, Natural England issued eleven more licences to cull badgers in new areas during 2020. The death toll in 2020’s cull is not yet known, with the figures from ten supplementary cull zones still to come.
Now public consultations relating to future bTB strategy including culling badgers have been launched this year with George Eustace briefing the House of Commons that the Government would phase out intensive badger culling. Again major media outlets ran the story and my local paper, the Hereford Times, like many other local papers with little funding for or interest in investigative journalism, reported his statement that there may be no licences issued for new areas after 2022. The BBC also reported on 29 January that ‘new mass badger cull licences are to be stopped after 2022 under plans to phase out culling of the wild animals.’
This is simply not true.
In fact very large numbers of badgers will be killed under licences already issued or issued up until 2022, since each licence rolls on for a further four years. That means intensive badger culling will continue until 2026, with the potential for ‘supplementary culls’ to continue until 2031. (Looks like we’ll get ‘zero badger’ before we get zero carbon anyway).That’s the REAL story. I’m not a journalist – that’s my excuse – but many journalists were bamboozled by George Eustace’s statement into reporting that the cull was ending, and many of the concerned public will have relaxed a little at the news.
I argued in my previous piece on badgers (‘Night Shift at Dadnor Bottoms’) that it was absurd to continue with the cull when apparently it was to end so soon, and that they were prolonging the cull for another year or so to placate the farmers and to look as if they were doing something. I wish I had been more cynical.
As far as I can see the Government is playing true to form displayed in other policy areas with misleading information portrayed as ‘fact’. This playground-level deception hinges on the use of the word ‘new’, as in ‘new cull licences are to be stopped after 2022 under plans to phase out culling…’ By that time much of Britain could be covered by cull licences – which will be ‘old’ cull licences, and therefore can be extended to 2026 and then by ‘supplementary culls’ until 2031. They won’t need to issue ‘new’ cull licence when so much of the country is already covered comprehensively well into the future by ‘old’ cull licences.
The plan for these areas is to kill 70% of all badgers, although estimates of badger population are dangerously inaccurate. When these cull licences expire in 2026 they will continue as ‘supplementary culls’ which, at present, roll on for 5 years but may reduce to 2 years. These allow licenced cull operatives to kill badgers for eight months of the year, which includes periods when badger cubs are still dependent on their mothers. It appears that the aim of the supplementary culls is to make sure the badger population does not recover.
The government has attempted to fool us into thinking the cull was going to end very soon when it seems likely that in all the current cull areas it will continue indefinitely, for how many ‘cull operatives’ will suddenly stop shooting badgers at the end of all this? Government policies have consolidated the simplistic and unscientific rural belief that badgers are at the root of the bTB problem, and brought into existence a cadre of rural badger killers who aren’t going to go away any time soon. Badger killing is now an accepted part of rural life, deeply embedded in the farming community, carried out by people who can be relied on in the future to frustrate the work of conservationists who are trying to repair our shattered ecosystems and to negotiate a renewal of coexistence with the creatures that we have already exterminated.