Badger cull petition at pub
PUB goers in Cheltenham showed their opposition to a trial badger cull which could take place in parts of Gloucestershire.
Dozens of regulars at the Jolly Brewmaster, in Painswick Road, signed a petition against the proposed cull, which could take place later this year in a bid to stop the spread of Bovine Tuberculosis among cattle.
Emma Tubbington, 28, said: "The sheet was going round during the pub quiz and it got lots of support."
The Badger Trust has launched an appeal against a High Court decision to allow the trials to go ahead. A Court of Appeal hearing should take place at the end of September.
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Comments
by dodgethebulle
Friday, September 07 2012, 1:26AM
“The official policy in Britain (and the rest of the European Union) is to eradicate bovine TB from cattle. This is laid out in 'The Bovine TB Eradication Programme For England' (DEFRA 2011b ). It is true that disease eradication has been achieved for smallpox in humans, and has recently been claimed for rinderpest in cattle. These diseases, however, have single maintenance hosts and hence eradication is a meaninful objective (CFSPH, 2008 ). But no disease with multiple maintenance hosts has ever been eradicated - and may never be. Moreover global eradication programmes are extremely expensive and can have very adverse side-effects, especially in relation to diverting resources from effective control methods (see Caplan, 2009 on 'Is eradication ethical?').
Even disease elimination - namely reduction to zero in the incidence of infection within a specified geographical area - is impractical when you have several wild maintenance hosts as with bovine TB. TB infected cattle can be removed using the 'test and cull' approach, with affected herds put under movement restriction and re-tested periodically to eliminate cattle that may shed the organism. But this approach cannot be used for wildlife reservoir species, which in Britain means badgers and fallow deer. Because sick badgers are more likely to get culled, large scale pro-active culls (actually a misuse of the term 'cull') may sometimes reduce the disease prevalence in badgers (Corner et al., 2008 ), but cannot possibly eliminate infections in a wild population, therefore given these facts, could it be the UK government has adopted a dysfunctional disease control policy merely to placate wealthy livestock farmers and avoid spending money?
If so, it is almost as unfair to farmers as it is to the badgers...
http://tinyurl.com/9ra96cg
https://http://tinyurl.com/9nmca3q”