Badgers & Farmers

What is it about badgers and farmers? Seriously, there are Hutus and Tutsis with less bad blood between them than our stripey, burrowing quadrupeds and our subsidy-chasing, Barbour-wearing bipeds. You have to wonder if there is some ghastly, traumatic incident behind the farmers' union's obsession with killing badgers - a long buried memory where the a young boy was repeatedly gang-tupped by boar badgers, a boy who grew up to become President of the NFU.

There really is no rational explanation for Caroline Spelman's decision to allow two test culls of badgers with the hope of limiting bovine TB, other than a desire to 'do something'. She might as well authorise beating squirrels to death with hammers in the hope that it might prevent another foot and mouth outbreak. Or why not electrocute a swan, see if that helps prevent bird flu. My only guess is that Spelman is trying to draw attention away from her 'let's sell off all those useless forests to the highest bidder' plan last year, by coming up with even more stupid and bovine concepts.

Cull me if you think you're hard enough!

The science, if you can call it that, goes like this. Badgers have TB, cows get TB, therefore the badgers give the cows TB, so if we kill all badgers, the cows won't have TB. Except they've tried this in Ireland to no great effect;  even the best case scenario suggest badger culls would only reduce bovine TB by 15%.

You might remember during the bird flu epidemic, swans and other wild birds were blamed for the contagion's spread. Then of course, it turned the real cuprit was dodgy practises in the intensive farming and meat processing trades. Psyschologists called this phenomenon projection, where you absolve your own feelings of guilt and shame by identifying those faults in others.

Ask yourself a simple question: which is more likely to be cause of chronic disease in British cattle? Is it badgers roaming in a small area or driving cows all over the UK for sale and then slaughter? Or indeed ask the broader question, is it in fact modern, intensive farming that causes disease in the first place?

The farmers could vaccinate their herds against TB, but it's expensive so they won't. Better to get the government to pay for a badger cull or as Bernard Matthews did, when you start an epidemic, get the taxpayer to pay the bill for damages.

The healthy countryside 

Peter Kendall, the President of the NFU, said it the pilot culls were  the first step towards 'a healthy countryside.' No, the first step would be the tackle the diseased modern farming methods. Indeed, we should not be taking lectures on health from an industry that fed ground-up pigs to chickens, fed infected blood to cows and has been responsible for three massive disease outbreaks in the last 30 years.

If the logic of the badger cull is that we should remove threats to British industry by whatever means necessary, the NFU ought to be in the crosshairs. No badger ever cost the nation billions through its own greed and foolishness.