Originally from: PoppaC
                        
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/02/22/nbook22.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/02/22/ixhome.html

Badgers bring on £2bn disaster

On Tuesday, a Tory front-bench spokesman will table the largest number of questions to a minister ever put down by an MP on a single subject on the same day. His purpose is to highlight a crisis which, by 2014, may have cost taxpayers £2 billion. Owen Paterson, the shadow agriculture minister, will put down 300 questions, in addition to the 200 that he has already asked, to expose the mishandling of the disaster being inflicted on our cattle industry by the epidemic of TB in Britain's soaring badger population, easily the largest in Europe.

The story of badgers, TB and cattle provides a tragic instance of how a seemingly idealistic policy can end up creating a disaster for all involved, including the badgers. The problem lies in the fact that badgers are Britain's best-loved wild mammal. As a secret internal report for the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs confirms, between 1975 and 1982 gassing badgers to prevent them spreading TB to cattle meant that the TB problem in Britain's dairy herd was almost non-existent.

Then, in 1982, badgers became a protected species. Gassing was outlawed. Pressure from animal rights groups, headed by the Political Animal Lobby, led to a new Badger Protection Act in 1992. The badger population exploded, more than tripling to 800,000. As if nature wished to find some control, badger TB reached epidemic levels, condemning them to a long and painful death. As this spread, so did TB in cattle which, because of its threat to human health, meant an ever higher bill for compulsory slaughter.

By 1997, when Labour came to power, aided by a £1 million gift from the Political Animal Lobby, a scientific adviser to the Government, Prof John Krebs, confirmed that there seemed to be a strong link between TB in badgers and cattle. But the Government was so terrified of taking action that Prof Krebs was commissioned to design a series of "trials", based on trapping and limited culling of badgers, to quantify the link.

These were so clumsy that, as answers already given to Mr Paterson show, the only consequence of the trials, costing £33.5 million, was to spread TB among cattle 27 per cent further, as badgers disturbed by trapping fanned out into uninfected areas. Some 5,000 cattle herds are now "restricted". Payments for slaughter last year were £31 million. But the spread is exponential, and Defra estimates that by 2010 public spending will have totalled £1 billion, with a further £1 billion by 2014.

The pain this inflicts on farmers is enormous. In north Devon, Tony Yewdall, the president of the Guernsey Society, and his son Jonnie have just heard that 48 more of their 300 Guernsey cattle are to be culled, having lost five already. On a farm swarming with diseased badgers, Mr Yewdall dreads his next TB test in April. Without urgent action, he fears that soon there will be nothing left of his pedigree herd, built up over 50 years,for his son and grandson to take on.

Last week Sir Ben Gill, the retiring president of the NFU, called for such action, not excluding gassing, the only effective method of culling, as the only way to save Britain's cattle industry from complete disaster. But as Defra's secret report shows, the Government appears paralysed. It talks of vaccination as one answer. But 10 years ago the ministry was promising an effective vaccine for cattle "within 10 years". Today, having spent £8 million on research, it predicts a vaccine may not be available for "10–15 years".

The Government is so fearful of public reaction to a mass-cull of badgers that it is happy to contemplate an even greater slaughter of cattle, at a cost which should alarm even Gordon Brown. As Mr Paterson says, "they are proposing to spend £1 to 2 billion of taxpayers' money, to achieve nothing". The irony is that the Government's policy is consigning hundreds of thousands of badgers, out of sight, to a very nasty death.

Mr Paterson, who has been concerned with TB since he became MP for North Shropshire in 1997 (and who is probably the only MP to have kept pet badgers), concludes: "It is clear from the ministry's answers that the only solution is a proper management policy which will restore balance to the countryside, benefiting everybody: farmers, other forms of wildlife – and ultimately the badgers themselves."