Thought this forum might be interested in this from our local paper:
Roger
Stop DEFRA killing more
Badgers -
www.stopthecull.info
The Cornishman Newspaper 12 January 2006
[SIZE="5"]Country Byways[/SIZE]
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DON'T know what's happening to official views of wildlife. On one hand
we have never been more ecofriendly or cared more for birds, bats, rare
plants or other protected species. A big proportion of the country is
now vegetarian, and the principles of the sanctity of life are more
widely held than ever before. But on the other I keep hearing calls for
what sounds like the Final Solution for unpopular creatures.
The ongoing tension between livestock farmers and
Badgers over the
spread of bovine TB is leading towards a proposal for mass
Badger
extermination. The
Badger, Britain's largest wild mammal, is already
protected, and you or I could face a stiff fine for even hurting one.
But when commercial interests, environmental changes and intractable
disease problems come into the picture the authorities are prepared to
think the absolutely unthinkable. Which in this case means making plans
to draw lines on the map and then simply pressing the delete button for
every
Badger within them.
I am an ex-farmer and have enormous sympathy for their increasing
predicament. I know how it feels to have TB reactors and put plans on
hold for 60 days or more, and then possibly lose a valuable beast while
the rest of the herd is quarantined. Businesses cannot sustain that
indefinitely, and farmers are beleaguered enough as it is. A
considerable amount of strategy and ingenuity is required to keep
diseased
Badgers and cattle apart, even if many of us believe it is the
cattle rather than the
Badgers which hold and spread the disease. But
sheer elimination is the solution least likely to be effective, on
several counts.
Firstly many people simply won't stand for it. If the animal rights
activists get mad over laboratory experiments and
Fox-hunting, they are
hardly likely to wink at mass
Badger slaughter. Even less committed
people will be repulsed by the prospect of the charismatic childhood
favourite, a symbol of the British countryside, being gassed, shot,
poisoned etc, in vast numbers.
Sympathy for farmers can never be relied upon, and many people will back
the
Badger against the cow.
Total elimination will be harder in practice than in theory. Fewer and
fewer people now know the ways of the country and not all those who do
will be prepared to give up their local knowledge of
Badger holts for
such an unpopular cause. DEFRA will certainly be denied access to some
areas of private land, which will require legal moves and possible use
of force to overcome.
Many previous cases have demonstrated clearly that trying to eliminate a
species has a very short-term effect: A cull creates a vacuum in nature
which nature is quick to fill, and
Badgers would not be off the scene
for long, requiring more painful and controversial episodes of destruction.
And if a cull was successful, what if the problem didn't go away? Would
the finger then point to foxes,
Rabbits, rats, mice, birds? And at what
point would we stop the massacre?
A cull is the bluntest of blunt instruments, cruel, short-sighted and
doomed to fail.
We have to be able to do better than that.
MS.
I'm more of a taxonomist/ecologist than a pure scientist as I can't be bothered with the maths most of the time.
