{"id":2701,"date":"2020-12-05T00:21:58","date_gmt":"2020-12-05T00:21:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/?p=2701"},"modified":"2021-03-11T20:51:15","modified_gmt":"2021-03-11T20:51:15","slug":"tb-badgers-and-cattle-in-the-uk-a-campaign-ripe-for-a-re-boot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/?p=2701","title":{"rendered":"TB, Badgers and Cattle in The UK: A Campaign Ripe For A Re-boot"},"content":{"rendered":"

Campaign Strategy Blog Post December 2020\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Chris Rose\u00a0 chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n

Posted at https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/?p=2701<\/p>\n

Download pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

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https:\/\/thebadgercrowd.org – photo<\/em><\/p>\n

Update 11 March 2021<\/h3>\n

True to form the UK (England) badger-TB issue has repeated its familiar cycle since I wrote this blog in December 2020. A new govt consultation<\/a> is due to close on 24 March. When it was briefed to the media, the government managed to make it sound as if badger culling was being abandoned in 2022, in favour of vaccination of cattle and badgers, and control of cattle movements. in reality, as The Wildlife Trusts have pointed out<\/a>, the proposal allows badger killing to continue until 2026 and ‘could see the death of 130,000 more badgers in England’.<\/em><\/p>\n

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What do you do with a long-running campaign that\u2019s got stuck ? \u00a0The English civil war over badger-culling and TB in cattle is one such case: an issue trapped in attrition and trench-warfare.<\/h3>\n

It\u2019s a long running struggle, going back at least to 1971 when a dead badger was found in the West of England, infected with bovine TB.\u00a0 Because culling (shooting, trapping or gassing) badgers was proposed very quickly, animal welfare groups soon adopted an anti-cull position, and farmers a pro-cull position.\u00a0 Each side has since tried to prove themselves right, leaving fewer and fewer people in \u2018the middle ground\u2019.<\/p>\n

Politicians immediately detected a tricky public communications issue: it could boil down to a popularity contest between farmers and badgers; a competition they did not want to have to oversee. \u00a0So they looked to \u2018Science\u2019 to decide.\u00a0 A series of \u2018Scientific Reviews\u2019 were held \u2013 at least seven major ones to date and many Parliamentary and other Inquiries (see Chronology).<\/p>\n

Scientists found it was all very complicated and the narrow question that politicians wanted answers to \u2013 \u2018can badger culling stop TB in cattle\u2019 ? \u2013 was not at all easy to answer because it was not clear how much TB was passing from cattle to badgers and vice-versa and within the cattle herds and within the badger population, and what effect that had on cattle TB.\u00a0 These questions have arguably still not been completely answered but scientific opinion is overwhelmingly that culling cannot eliminate TB, whereas cattle movement and health controls and biosecurity measures probably can, and only perhaps 0-6% of TB in cattle is directly passed to them by badgers (see supporting documents and particularly Science).<\/p>\n

As a result, the battling factions of farmers on one side, and animal welfare groups, and conservationists on the other, have fought almost to a standstill over an issue which converts in the media to \u2018who is to blame for TB in cattle: is it farmers or badgers?\u2019 \u00a0\u00a0Both lobbies exchange fire using scientific research as ammunition.\u00a0 Often the same research has been used to draw diametrically opposed conclusions.<\/p>\n

Involved scientists include those who believe they could yet sort it out if only politicians and the opposed lobbies stayed out of things, and those who plaintively try to tell politicians that it\u2019s a question of value-judgements, which science as such cannot answer. Politicians of course know this but it\u2019s not something they want to hear, and not something governments have to hear, so the various independent expert panels have been set up and then abolished. \u00a0In this respect it is very like long-running science-heavy arguments over subjects such as GMOs or even aspects of contemporary Covid strategy.<\/p>\n

So almost every year (see Chronology), the two sides mount new offensives and counter-offensives but like opposing armies deadlocked on the Western Front of World War One,\u00a0 neither scores a decisive victory.<\/p>\n

Change of Strategy <\/strong><\/p>\n

Barring a sudden technical breakthrough such as widespread deployment of effective vaccines for cattle or badgers, neither of which looks imminent, unless there is a change in strategy, the stalemate seems likely to continue.<\/p>\n

In this post (more detail in supporting papers) I argue that the best option for wildlife groups is to \u2018go up a scale\u2019 and refocus and reframe their efforts on not just on TB in badgers and cattle but in terms of the de-escalation of conventional (intensive) cattle farming itself.<\/p>\n

In particular this means dairy farming, which has become progressively more intensive, larger-scale and more polluting, over the period of the cattle-badger TB issue. \u00a0Strangely, although it is accepted that many elements of intensification are causes of higher TB in cattle (such as contaminated slurry, larger herds kept indoors, maize growing for feed, leaking silage and frequent movements of large numbers of cattle with inadequate testing), this has hardly been considered as a cause of England\u2019s \u2018intractable\u2019 cattle TB problem.\u00a0 Successive Conservative Ministers and the National Farmers Union have fixed on attacking badgers as the cause instead.<\/p>\n

Many aspects of those intensive farming elements are undisputed causes of damage to public goods\u2019 such as healthy air, soil or water as well as known risk factors for TB. \u00a0The global imperative to cut climate-heating gases from livestock farming and cattle provides an additional imperative to downsize cattle farming in favour of rewilding, biodiversity, ecosystem regeneration and a more plant-based diet.<\/p>\n

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Badgers were gassed with cyanide by the Ministry of Agriculture until it was ruled inhumane when it was discovered that they did not die quickly like rabbits \u2013 cover from ECOS magazine 1981.\u00a0 Shooting them with rifles above ground was substituted, and continues despite the fact that a scientific appraisal found it also to be inhumane (see Chronology).<\/em><\/p>\n

A Long Running Policy Failure<\/strong><\/p>\n

England\u2019s country\u2019s chronic bovine TB problem has eluded government attempts at eradication since the 1930s. It almost succeeded when by using the agricultural equivalents of \u2018test track trace and isolate\u2019 now familiar with coronavirus (only with slaughter thrown in for infected livestock, which is frustrating and upsetting for farmers) all of the UK was declared free from cattle TB in 1960.\u00a0 The disease fell to just 0.6% in 1965.<\/p>\n

Transfer of TB from cattle to the human UK population was effectively stopped by meat inspection and milk treatment by the 1960s but TB was never eliminated from the national cattle herd.\u00a0 Controls were relaxed and it slowly started to regrow from a small chronically infected areas including but not only at West Penwith, near the SW tip of Cornwall.<\/p>\n

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Slaughter of TB-infected UK cattle 1956 \u2013 2017 (<\/em>Source RSPCA<\/em><\/a>) \u2018reactors\u2019 = cattle reacting to a test.\u00a0 Numbers slaughtered blue line, testing positive red line. <\/em><\/p>\n

Then in 1971, vets discovered a dead badger with TB in Gloucestershire.\u00a0 Badgers were suggested as a \u2018maintenance reservoir\u2019 of the disease in wildlife, which might be infected-by and reinfect cattle. \u00a0Many farmers and landowners had long regarded badgers as pests and vermin, and from 1973 fell in behind killing (\u2018culling\u2019) badgers, often with enthusiasm. \u00a0It was widely assumed that badgers must be the reason why TB in cattle had not been eliminated, and while the previously conventional tools of movement control, testing and sanitation on farms were never completely forgotten, culling badgers became the default \u2018missing ingredient\u2019 of policy.<\/p>\n

So what had been seen as a human health and agricultural disease problem, became reframed as a farming and wildlife problem.\u00a0 The current campaign battle-lines were established.<\/p>\n

A research and management policy community developed in which farm vets, animal disease epidemiologists and microbiologists were joined by academic ecologists and zoologists. \u00a0\u00a0Government began what would become a long series of badger culls and research projects to establish whether or not culling \u2018worked\u2019 or could work but the meaning of the results was contested.\u00a0 One reason for this was that most of the \u2018research\u2019 projects served a political dual purpose of also being badger \u2018control\u2019 and so very few were designed in such a way as to be properly controlled or rule out \u2018confounding\u2019 factors or auto-correlations.<\/p>\n

Some government scientists and most politicians became implicit or explicit proponents of culling.\u00a0 They saw research as a way to test how culling could best work, as opposed to whether it worked at all or alternatives might be better.<\/p>\n

To begin with the default was \u2018reactive\u2019 culling, meaning culling in response to problems with TB in cattle herds.\u00a0 Nevertheless, TB rates in cattle increased. \u00a0A 1997 review led by ecologist Professor John Krebs recommended what became a ten-year scientific trial to test the effectiveness of reactive or proactive badger culling against non-intervention controls: the RBCT or Randomized Badger Culling Trial.\u00a0 An \u2018Independent Scientific Group\u2019 (ISG) led by Professor John Bourne ran the RBCT and it was soon found that \u2018reactive\u2019 culling made matters worse not better because it disrupted badger society and increased TB.\u00a0 In 2007 the ISG reported:<\/p>\n

\u2018\u2018badger culling can make no meaningful contribution to cattle TB control in Britain\u2019\u2019 and \u2018scientific findings indicate that the rising incidence of disease can be reversed, and geographical spread contained, by the rigid application of cattle-based control measures alone\u2019.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

Bourne later told researchers Stephen McCullough and Michael Reiss<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u2018There was a very definite view from the outset that future policy was going to be the reactive culling. That was it. And when it was shown that it was not gonna work there was all hell let loose\u2019\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

Culling itself was shown to disrupt badger communities (\u2018perturbation\u2019), and although rates of infection in badgers fell inside the cull area, they went up outside it.\u00a0 Meanwhile TB rates in English cattle went on rising and the \u2018pro-badger\u2019 camp started to promote badger vaccination, which had first been raised as an idea by vets back in 1971.<\/p>\n

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TB in cattle spread after the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease epidemic, when cattle carrying TB were used to restock areas such as the Midlands and Cumbria (<\/em>Source<\/em><\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n

After many twists and turns (see Chronology), by a process of campaign focus, political polarisation (with Britain\u2019s Labour Party becoming pro-vaccine, anti-cull and Conservative governments resolutely pro-cull), fierce pro-cull lobbying by the NFU as the champion of the farming side, and media simplification, \u2018the issue\u2019 was boiled down to the current bipolar framing of \u2018culling versus vaccination\u2019. \u00a0Positions became entrenched, deadlocked like the Western Front of WWI.<\/p>\n

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The Western Front in WWI left and English battle lines on TB in 2016 right. Derbyshire, the site of one of the latest clashes, is at the top right corner of the ochre coloured zone (Wikipedia and <\/em>APHA<\/em><\/a>). <\/em><\/p>\n

Over time, the weight of scientific opinion among first ecologists, and then vets, shifted against the idea that badger culling could be effective and humane in eliminating TB in cattle.\u00a0 Many studies continued to show that most transmission was down to TB spreading within cattle herds and by cattle movements but the political influence of farmers on Conservative governments meant that culling continued on the grounds that badgers played some<\/em> role, even if this was hard to quantify, and any subsequent reduction in cattle TB was even harder to pin down.<\/p>\n

Alternatives to culling have been side-lined by the pragmatic government imperative of trying to suppress the disease while appeasing both sides of the debate in public. Aside from a short interlude under a Labour Government which favoured vaccination over culling, government has bowed to farming pressure and continued killing badgers.<\/p>\n

The stand-off has gone on so long that the issue now also has its own historians. Many have pointed out, as did the government-commissioned 2018 Godfray Review, that the fixation on badgers has largely excluded policy options of sanitation, biosecurity and husbandry which successfully controlled cattle TB in other countries (and until the 1970s, in the UK).<\/p>\n

Currently the government policy is to intermittently cull badgers, back development of a usable cattle vaccine, and allow but not seriously pursue badger vaccination, leaving that to mostly to NGOs such as the Wildlife Trusts.\u00a0 There is little TB in Scotland, and Wales has switched to badger vaccination, while England\u2019s government (confusingly the \u2018UK\u2019 Westminster government) has steered itself into an uncomfortable no-man\u2019s land between the two dug-in camps.\u00a0 Because culling and vaccination are often in conflict, this has sent conflicting signals and led to criticism of the government and legal actions against it by both sides.<\/p>\n

Badgers are popular animals in the UK and the issue is sometimes hard to ignore.\u00a0 In 2019, Prime Minister Boris Johnson himself got involved and intervened to restrict a cull in Derbyshire after being lobbied by his now wife, conservationist Carrie Symonds, because of a Derbyshire Wildlife Trust vaccination project (see document on vaccination).<\/p>\n

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Carrie Symonds, Boris Johnson and badger,\u00a0<\/em>Image: Daily Express<\/a><\/p>\n

In March 2020 Johnson\u2019s government announced a \u2018shift\u2019 in policy to phase out culling in favour of badger vaccination, and in July 2020 it hailed a \u2018scientific breakthrough\u2019 of a test which could enable a cattle vaccine to be used (a test is needed which can distinguish between infected and vaccinated cattle, otherwise they cannot be exported).\u00a0 Then in September, it suddenly announced a new and much larger cull of over 60,000 badgers, taking the number sanctioned to be killed since 2013 to 170,000, or 35% of all badgers in the UK.\u00a0Unsurprisingly, it was accused of a u-turn.<\/p>\n

A \u2018Cultural Divide\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

The badger-cattle issue splits opinion across an ancient English cultural divide, about who has the right to determine what happens to wildlife in the countryside: landowners or the public?\u00a0 It\u2019s a proxy conflict for a well-financed but numerically weak landowning and hunting lobby which promotes a largely mythical idea that England divides into \u2018rural\u2019 and \u2018urban\u2019 tribes with irreconcilably different values (see supporting document on Rural Politics).<\/p>\n

In the court of public opinion, the pro-badger lobby wins easily, and politically, farmers are electorally insignificant in population terms, so why hasn\u2019t culling been abandoned or reduced to a relatively minor tool of policy ?\u00a0 For several reasons.<\/p>\n

First because farming and landowning interests are heavily over-represented in the policy-making corridors of Whitehall and Westminster.\u00a0 Second, because the \u2018popular vote\u2019 counts for nothing in the English electoral system, and in a sprinkling of Britain\u2019s first-past-the-post geographic constituencies, the farming vote is important.\u00a0 \u00a0Third because the \u2018rural\u2019 vote is very important electorally to the Conservative Party and although only 17% of the population live in what are classified as rural areas, they elect all the MPs who can claim to speak on and for \u2018rural\u2019 issues. \u00a0(Polling actually shows that \u2018rural people\u2019 are slightly more likely to see \u2018animal welfare\u2019 as important than \u2018urban\u2019 people but the ‘countryside’ lobby claims the opposite).<\/p>\n

This makes for a stand-off of complementary strengths and weaknesses in which the NGOs have mostly won the air war and lost the ground war but neither side has proved able to achieve an outright win.\u00a0 To make matters worse (see Conclusions in the supporting papers), the larger NGOs are shy of taking on agri-business and perhaps intimidated by the NFU, which exploits the myth of rural-urban divides for its own purposes.<\/p>\n

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Advocating their right to \u2018control\u2019 wildlife as a political ideology – the \u00a0\u2018Countryside Alliance\u2019 promotes field sports and badger culling and revels in accentuating perceptions of a rural-urban divide \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

What Next ?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The pro-badger faction could opt to continue the battle of attrition and hope that a majority Labour government is elected in 2024 (the last one stopped culling and brought in six vaccination trials, five of which were cancelled by an incoming Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition) but there is no guarantee of that. \u00a0So is there a way to fix the pro-badger campaign?<\/p>\n

The Opportunity<\/strong><\/p>\n

I suggest that the opportunity for the \u2018pro-badger\u2019 side is to step up a scale, shift the battle ground and change the players by putting the badger-TB-cattle issue into a wider frame around the sustainability-or-not of intensive farming and specifically, dairy farming, \u00a0for three reasons.<\/p>\n

First, the progressive narrowing of focus so that TB in cattle is seen as a choice of badger culling v badger vaccination excludes an array of cattle-focused measures which worked before in the UK and abroad.\u00a0 No convincing evidence has been produced to show why the involvement of badgers means these measures cannot work now. They need to be revisited.<\/p>\n

Second, the same restricted political lens means that \u2018the badger\/ cattle TB issue\u2019 also routinely excludes a nexus of intensification factors which changed farming fundamentally. The UK joined the EU in 1973, and farm intensification was encouraged by government in order to cash in on the Common Agricultural Policy of the time.\u00a0 At the same moment, bovine TB had just started to bounce back (see Farm Intensification and Science and TB papers).\u00a0 Land use change and farming practice very possibly made cattle farming, and especially dairy farming, more susceptible to TB.\u00a0 Geographically, dairy intensification has involved specialisation and concentration. \u00a0At a farm enterprise level it has brought conversion of hay meadows to silage, indoor and ever larger herds, massive slurry production and maize-growing. (See paper on Farm Intensification). \u00a0All these are known risk factors encouraging TB but by default, are little investigated because egged on by the National Farmers Union, badgers have been nailed as the villains of the TB story by politicians.<\/p>\n

Third and perhaps most important, the cattle TB issue is isolated in its own little silo. It\u2019s not being \u2018joined up\u2019 to other issues where there are bigger and urgent political imperatives in play which at least nominally, are now accepted by the current UK Government.\u00a0 The top one is that acting on climate targets demands a radical change in farming and diet, including less dairy and less beef, meaning fewer cattle, and requires land for carbon sequestration.<\/p>\n

In addition many Conservatives and others support more rewilding, a shift from farm subsidy to payment for delivering public goods (eg clean rivers, in which respect farm pollution is a current disaster in England), rather than just paying farmers to produce more crops and meat, or simply exist as a farm.\u00a0 These aims have been advocated by influential Cabinet Minister Michael Gove since 2018, and are now expressed in new Environment and Agriculture Bills and a Plan to overhaul farming.<\/p>\n

In short, the \u2018productivist\u2019 model which lives on as the assumed purpose behind both subsidising cattle farming and culling badgers is, to put it in political terms, already subject to radical revision.\u00a0 It\u2019s a weak door, if NGOs have the nerve to kick it.<\/p>\n

Strategic elements that could be drawn into this include:<\/p>\n