England has continued to issue permits allowing people to kill badgers to protect cattle from disease, despite local extinctions and scientific evidence stating that badger culling is not the best way to protect bovines. What’s happening?
The Guardian reported that it accessed leaked documents showing that England’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs issued 17 new licenses in June that allow people to kill badgers. The publication explains that badger culling has been used in the country for years to stop the spread of bovine tuberculosis to cattle and has led to local extinctions.
However, scientific reports have shown that culling badgers is not the most effective way to stop the spread of this disease, and DEFRA’s decision overrules the advice of its own scientific adviser, Peter Brotherton, director of science for Natural England.
As someone whose family keeps cows:
DEFRA are less concerned with eradicating TB in cattle than protecting beef exports. There has been a vaccine for bovine TB for years. But it is not compatible with the skin test which is a prerequisite for exporting beef to most countries (the current test doesn’t work on vaccinated cattle). They are in the process of developing a new test, which is taking years and will then need to be incorporated into international trading standards, which isn’t going to be quick either.
All of which is just masking the root cause of TB’s prevalence anyway, which is effectively ‘battery’ farming cows. Who would have thought that cramming a maximum number of animals into a minimum sized space would result in an airborne disease spreading through them? These places are basically like Victorian workhouses or WW1 trenches, which were notorious for being hotbeds of tuberculosis in humans.
If you’re a farmer though, that’s how you need to keep animals if you want to be competitive in the market. Unless you’re lucky enough to have inherited a large amount of land and decide to use it to prioritise the health of your animals over maximising profits.
Maybe a techno-fix will sustain this for a while but ultimately it’s too meshed in with the inertia of capitalist economics and demand for low cost animal products for the problem to be properly solved.
Shooting badgers has been used to kick the can down the road and avoid sincerely tackling the problem of bovine TB, while also throwing a toy to those in the rural community and humouring them by allowing them to hunt something. A shrewd move for a career politician but does nothing to look out for animals, farmers, vets, the public, the environment or the economy.
Can you explain the skin test and why it doesn’t work?
Two types of tuberculin are injected into the cow’s neck; one bovine and one avian (the control). Three days later the resulting swellings are compared. A large enough swelling of the bovine injection site compared to the avian one is interpreted as evidence of an immune response having been mounted against it because the cow has previously been exposed to the bovine strain. In a cow that’s been vaccinated, the skin test provokes an immune response in the same way as in a cow who is actively infected, rendering the test useless for detecting active infections i.e it produces false positives. Nobody will import your animals if they can’t tell whether they’ve been vaccinated or are ridden with an infectious disease. A couple of countries have chosen to simply sacrifice exports and get on with vaccination, which is good in terms of preventing tens of thousands of cows being needlessly slaughtered early but it also means they can continue to keep the cows in the conditions that make diseases like TB spread in their herds. It’s bad for the animals quality of life but it’s also stupid because TB isn’t the only disease which will emerge in herds kept in those conditions.
TLDR it’s all short-term profit-driven thinking.
Thanks for that great explanation!
No probs :)
Thanks for sharing this. When I saw the headline, I knew there was going to be at least one better solution to the problem, but it was going to have an economic cost.
The western United States is going to kill half a million Barred Owls to try to save the endangered Spotted Owl. The Barred Owls have only moved in due to the destruction caused by the timber industry and climate change. Studies have showed a number of factors, like those I just mentioned, and also the more niche requirements of the Spotted Owl losing out to the more aggressive and adaptable Barred Owls. The only avenue that is being pursued is the owl killing, not better industry regulation. There has been legislation passed to protect the environment somewhat, but there are some major loopholes that still let the same destructive practices continue though.
How they expect to save the owl while still allowing the very specific habitat it needs to be destroyed is beyond me, and seems to be the same kicking of the can down the road that you mentioned.
I know its complicated but, for me at least, the fact that we have to continuously intervene to prevent the harm done by our system shows that it’s a bad system. And also, why does the response so often have to be killing something/someone?
I’m starting to believe it was never that great of a system. I think many recent events around the world have really removed much of the veneer and we’re seeing we aren’t as far from feudalism as we wanted to believe. To keep it simple as I believe class systems work a bit different between the US and Europe, but it seems the only real change has been the merchant class replacing the nobility. With governments essentially outsourcing to industry the drafting of legislation and regulation, they’ve maintained their positions of power, and we’re allowed to be peasants as long as we’re good consumers. No one seems to like when we question where things come from or what the overall price of goods and services are.
I deleted a reply to another thread yesterday about America’s 2 party system as I didn’t want to get into it with that many people in a political community, but here, the right feels like the robber barons of the early 1900s, who want to toss all the regulations on industry and just bleed everything dry for what it’s worth, and our left feels like the colonialists who see the majority of us as lesser people that just need to be more like them, while not allowing most of us to have the success many of them were born into.
To steer back to our actual topic, killing is cheap, quick, and to the goals of both of the mentioned groups above, it does accomplish their goals. Whether that be people, animals, or the environment, the limitations seem to vary by country, but we all seem to be compromised to a large extent. There was another UK article posted on Lemmy yesterday about how when you go outside now, you hear silence more than seeing the insects, birds, and other animals many of us saw when we were kids (I assume were talking about those of us around the 40+ age at this point), and we have the same types of articles here. There were so many butterflies, fireflies, mantises, grasshoppers, rabbits, owls, foxes, and deer here when I was a child, and where I live feels so devoid of life now in comparison. I can only imagine what it was like before the age of industry. That we can see and feel this loss, but still keep heading down this path makes me ill.
My thoughts on the owl situation here it to let them hybridize. The native Spotted Owls era seems to have passed. We’ve destroyed too much of what they need, and forests need 100-200 years to really support life like this. Current breeding and release programs for this particular owl don’t work well. The Barred Owl is very adaptable, seemingly too well for its own good. The are currently cross-breeding and have resultant children. Perhaps this new owl could preserve some of the Spotted Owl genes, instead of us losing it altogether. But the hybrids are currently killed as well. Some success seems better than none, and this seems to be nature’s solution to what we’re doing. The planet seems to know better than we do what works.
I hope this wasn’t too negative and gloomy. I typically avoid this stuff here, as I’m more about the conservation than the politics and wish to spend my time doing more positive posting, but they very much overlap. Many of the politics here are a bit too extreme for me, and I just don’t want to get sucked into that, but this seemed a reasonable place to share some of my thoughts.