I've just signed the 38 degrees petition to stop the plan to cull thousands of badgers next spring. You can take action here.
According to one journalist (Andrew Arbuckle in The Scotsman newspaper last week) that makes me one of “the millions who now believe badgers are humans with stripy coats”. We are the “anti-cull crowd” who have the nerve to lobby their MPs on an animal welfare issue, who argue on the basis of emotion, not science. Many of us, no doubt, are also guilty of town-dwelling.
Of course it’s always good fun to take a pop at “the animal rights brigade”, and accusing the animal welfare lobby of ignorance is part of the routine. But when it comes to science, who can speak with more authority than Lord Krebs, who oversaw the ten-year trial of randomised badger culling?
It was Lord Krebs who said on the Radio 4 Today programme that the UK government was “going against the science”. He added that more than half the cases of TB were the result of cattle to cattle transmission, and that disrupting badgers’ territorial systems by shooting would cause an increase in the disease around the edge of the culling areas, not a decrease. More farmers’ livelihoods would be threatened, and he could not understand why the NFU thought culling was a good idea.
Bovine TB is a terrible disease that causes animals to suffer and requires cattle to be slaughtered in their thousands. So any animal welfare group worth its salt would want to find a solution. But culling badgers is simplistic and inhumane. It would be far better to persuade the government to invest in a long-term, science-led approach to bovine TB, to find real solutions, not unscientific political gestures – and to make sure that thousands of wild creatures aren't needlessly slaughtered in the process.
So please, sign the petition to stop the proposals on badger culling.