Badgers face the death penalty for contributing to high rates of bovine tuberculosis.
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By Geoff Brumfiel of Nature magazine
England’s West Country is a bucolic landscape of winding country lanes and gently rolling pastures. But as autumn darkens into winter, a war, complete with armed marksmen and camouflaged saboteurs, is about to erupt from the hedgerows. Both sides claim science as their ally.
At issue is the badger (Meles meles), one of the largest predators left in the British Isles after millennia of human occupation. The furry creature is an iconic and beloved species — but to farmers, it is a menace that infects their cattle with bovine tuberculosis (TB). The disease, caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium bovis, could cost the government £1 billion (US$1.6 billion) in control measures and compensation over the next decade. As early as this week, government-sanctioned hunters will begin a pilot effort to cull the badgers. Animal-rights activists — a potent force in Britain — are furious, and are planning protests, milk boycotts and sabotage of the culls.
Battles over wildlife management are hardly unique to England. In the United States, environmentalists and ranchers spar over wolves, which have been reintroduced to many states. In Western Australia, the government has proposed a cull of coastal sharks in response to a swimmer’s death, angering green groups. But the badger question stands out in one distinctive way: it has been systematically studied for more than a decade by scientists at some of England’s top universities.
Badgers do carry TB and can infect cows through direct and indirect contact, and years of research and tens of millions of pounds have gone into studying whether killing them would protect herds. During a 9-year trial, scientists tramped through hundreds of square kilometers of pastureland, probing dens, collecting road kill and performing autopsies on more than a thousand badgers to check for TB. The results are discussed at length in a 287-page UK government study and in numerous scientific papers, including several in Nature.
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10 Comments
Add CommentIf they aren't determining which of the badgers have the infection as part of the cull then it seems to me that it would be a waste of time. Especially if you need to kill 70% of the badger population to get a reduction of 16%. That's just wasteful, and could backfire in the long run. Getting smarter about protecting cattle, and starting to immunize badgers would actually provide a meaningful reduction in infection rates. The science isn't unclear, the people who are supposed to explain it are.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI understand why vaccination of cows is undesirable, due to the conundrum, of differentiating milk from TB infected cows, Vs milk from TB vaccinated cows. I presume TB antibodies would be found in both.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo it seems the logical, unemotional path would be a combinatorial thrust to eliminate the natural wild reservoir contagion. Severe culling (75%) to a manageable population, followed thru, with a vaccination program on the surviving population, for the burn-out of this serious disease. A healthy, better, population will quickly restore itself. If vaccines have poor effectiveness, then improve them or deepen the cull.
I have to admit, I would not like to have the job of vaccinating badgers... but disease should be overwhelmed. Failure means more suffering for this magnificent animals.
Half measures can only prolong suffering and risk, in vain. GK
Why not urn the government sanctioned hunters into government sanctioned vaccinators. Switch out the rifle for a dart gun. Or they could just make the badgers wear little N95 masks.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVaccinating wild animals is a difficult prospect. There is no way they would be able to vaccinate 100% of the population. Likewise, it would be difficult to cull just 75% of a population whose size is just an estimate.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt would be great if we could get all the badgers to register for an immunization shot but they don't work that way. Whatever method that is used would need to be self propagating through the population. Anything else would leave a subset of the population untreated and the disease would just come back later, maybe even resistant to the vaccine.
What is needed is a propagation methodology that is would circulate the "cure" naturally throughout the badger population. I do not think they have such a method at this time. This effort is doomed to failure and may very well backfire with badgers infected with a newly resistant version of TB.
One problem which this article does not mention is that vaccinating against M. bovis is normally rather ineffective. Experiments carried out by the UK Government have shown that this is especially so where badgers are concerned; even heavy doses of the live vaccine confer little protection, and the communal living habits of badgers in burrows provide a near-perfect way to cross-infect an entire group from one infected individual.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBovine TB used to be a problem in Britain, until rigorous screening and culling of cattle, together with gassing of badger burrows in the vicinity of TB outbreaks served to almost extinct the disease. In the end it was politics that allowed it back in again; the incoming Socialist government took donations from a huge assortment of groups and (unusually for politicians) honoured their word a lot of the time. One group called for a cessation of the culling policy, another for very harsh anti-persecution laws to protect badgers. Both were successful, and the TB eradication and badger population controls were ceased.
Since then, the badger population has exploded and into this highly susceptible population bovine TB has spread like wildfire.
The state of things at present is thus: biosecurity and testing/culling of cows doesn't eradicate bovine TB, and indeed cannot eradicate it whilst there is a wildlife reservoir of the disease. Vaccinations against TB provide protection for at most two years in resistent animals like cows and humans, and do little in highly susceptible animals like badgers. The Irish have demonstrated that to control bovine TB you need to address the wildlife reservoir of the disease; the British have yet to develop sufficient moral fortitude to tell the protestors this and make it stick.
If you kill off an animal in an area, other animals of the same type are just going to take their place. Vaccinating the badgers that are already there periodically would probably work better than leaving the area open for new badgers that may or may not be infected to move in. What they need to do, is think of some way to keep the badgers and cattle from occupying the same areas. A larger predator would probably work. Reintroduce some kind of once native British predator that is big enough to scare off the badgers, but small enough to not bother the cattle. Or, just do the numbers and figure out how many cattle a larger predator would likely kill in a year, and compare it to how many cattle would have to be put down due to TB gotten from the badgers, and choose it that way.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy not send out scads of environmentalists and animal lovers to vaccinate all of the badgers? It would make them feel important, noble, self-sacrificing and altruistic. It would also cure a huge reservoir of sentimentality as they are treated for bites from outraged badgers. On the other hand it would make more sense to vaccinate all of the cows. It's easier, they won't bite the vaccinators and leaves to badgers to go about their business of catching rodents.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSince the natural prey of badgers is rodents, has anyone analyzed the impact on the farms and ranches and the spread of other diseases from the population explosion among rodents. Plague isn't fun people.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn the USA we have ranchers that clear out rabbits whenever they can because cows step in the burrows and snap legs. A real study would include all of the impact and not just 1 narrow area.
To me it just seems like a stupid solution. Badgers are causing a problem so we immediatly think "Just go out and shoot em and our problem will be solved". But in reality I dont believe that would work, and we will end up hurting the badger species greatly.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo you believe that we should just go out and start shooting badgers left and right and that will solve our problem? Do you not think things we humans do effect the badger population? So should the badgers just start to kill humans. No, we cant have a solution by just killing, we need to be smart and work with nature rather than to destroy it.
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