Common Ground (34 page)

The badger (
Meles meles
) seems, on the surface, an unlikely candidate to wind up at the heart of any media frenzy. Nocturnal, redoubtable, clean-living, enigmatic, rarely seen at all other than as a dead black and white bundle by the side of the road, it has only been thrust centre stage at all because of our reliance on, and increasing exploitation of, another animal – the cow. Britain's ever-squeezed and long-suffering cattle-farming industry is stuck in a dirty war with an intractable disease. Bovine tuberculosis is a ruthless and, according to recent government data, resurgent disease that causes tens of thousands of beef and dairy cattle to be slaughtered every year in England and Wales, striking with particular virulence in the south-west counties of Gloucestershire and Somerset. ‘The White Death', as it's known, devastates wherever it hits, exacting a heavy emotional and financial price from farmers as it jumps through their herds and across neighbouring lands, wiping out prized bloodlines, forcing the sudden shut-down of livelihoods, restricting movement and heralding the precautionary killing of huge numbers of beasts, many of which turn out to be disease-free in post-mortem. It's a crushing process for families to have to bear and a terrible psychological burden to live with that constant fear. Testing has become more rigorous and regular but even half an eye on the news will tell you that bovine TB continues to be a thorn in the side of the ‘rural economy', stacking up a costly bill for the British taxpayer as a result. Those thousands upon thousands of prematurely killed cattle have incurred a half a billion pound bill paid to farmers in the ten years between 2001 and 2011, mostly in compensation. With the government's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) estimating that amount will double over the next decade, the pressure to win the war on TB has become intense from all sides.

The problem for the badger is that, just as the virus jumps from cow to cow, it is also passed on to other species through breathing and exposure to cattle faeces and urine. Sheep, pigs, cats and deer can all be infected, all could theoretically bring the disease back into a herd, but the badger has long been suspected by farmers as the most problematic of these carriers because of its home and habits. It lives in the woods at the edges of fields, often sharing the same ground and foraging at night among drowsing stock, industriously toeing over cowpats and digging earth for worms. In 1971, when a dead badger tested positive for the bacteria in an area of Gloucestershire badly hit by bovine TB, the Ministry of Agriculture made no secret of its results and almost overnight the animal became a national scapegoat, despite there being no hard scientific evidence that badgers were even capable of transmitting the disease back to cows. A villain had been caught red-handed and long-held suspicions about the ‘wildlife reservoir' being at the root of the re-infection of cattle appeared vindicated. A causality link existed, no matter how tenuous, complex and multi-faceted. It was enough to herald a new front in the war on TB: the first official culls of badgers in Britain; the mass gassing of setts near hot-spots. Hydrogen cyanide was supposed to kill gently by putting the animals to sleep, but when the gas was shown to cause lingering, excruciating deaths, it was replaced with the swifter and ‘cleaner' process of trapping the badgers live and shooting them in the back of the head. Throughout the 1980s and '90s the link between badgers and bovine TB levels in cows was tested and retested through mostly unscientific field studies and culls. Trapping and shooting were licensed in a reactionary move wherever outbreaks struck, provoking little fanfare or public controversy because the numbers of cattle and badgers killed in each incident was relatively small. Figures collated since the 1980s showed that both bovine TB and badger numbers appeared to be on the rise, but actual evidence of the animal's contribution to the disease remained, at best, inconclusive. After forty years of policy failure in tackling the virus, there was a large-scale independent review of bovine TB management policy in 1996, chaired by Professor (and later Lord) John Krebs. This recommended that the government undertake a scientific trial to establish once and for all whether badgers were responsible for a resurgence of bovine TB in cattle and, importantly, whether killing them would help reduce the incidence of the disease in stock.

The Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT) was conducted over nine years between 1998 and 2007. It involved the deaths of 10,979 badgers at a staggering cost of nearly fifty million pounds but, despite opposition from animal rights activists, it was widely held as money and time well invested. This was the longest and most in-depth experimental study of the effects of badger culling on TB in cattle in the world. It was what Defra itself called ‘the best scientific evidence available from which to predict the effects of a future culling policy'. The RCBT found that, at the most, culling would reduce incidences of cattle TB by 12–16 per cent over nine years and subsequently, in the words of John Bourne, the scientist who led the trial:
badger culling cannot meaningfully contribute to the control of cattle TB in Britain. Indeed, some policies under consideration are likely to make matters worse rather than better.
The Labour government followed his recommendations, but it was clear even before publication that not everyone wanted to listen. During 2004 the (then) shadow environment minister, Owen Paterson, was busy tabling a record number of Parliamentary questions (almost 600) on bovine TB.
¹
He was keen to bolster his image both as a ‘true blue countryman' dedicated to eradicating the disease and – prudently, in political terms – as a willing mouthpiece for the powerful farming lobby, the National Farmers Union, making it clear he shared its belief that badger culling was a necessity, regardless of what the trial found. So when the coalition government took power in 2010 it came as no surprise when it made good on its promises, revisiting the RCBT trial data and, inexplicably, drawing a different conclusion to the scientists: that killing badgers in substantial numbers is essential to stemming the rise of tuberculosis in British cattle. Suddenly culling was back on the cards.

In recent weeks, and with Paterson freshly appointed as environment minister, it has been rampantly pushed up Defra's priority list. The pilot shooting schemes are due to begin any day now in west Gloucestershire and west Somerset. But this is only the start of it. If ‘successful', the government is committed to rolling out the cull nationally, which could mean many tens of thousands of badgers being killed, regardless of whether they are diseased or healthy. This despite the fact that the cull goes against all rigorous scientific evidence and economic logic and, if you believe the experts, will have no meaningful impact on reducing bovine TB in cattle.

The government must surely have expected a backlash – this is, after all, highly contentious policy – but even so I doubt many in power could have predicted that the plight of the badger would become the inflammatory issue it has among British voters. The opposition is growing daily. No wonder the minister sounded so indignant on the radio this morning. A public e-petition calling for the abandonment of the cull and a Commons debate on the issue has amassed over 150,000 signatures; rock stars, famous naturalists and spokesmen from wildlife charities are appearing on TV shows imploring the Prime Minister to intervene; police are warning Defra over spiralling costs as activists pledge to disrupt gunmen and frighten off targets with a chorus of vuvuzelas left over from the World Cup. Images of badgers are appearing on every front page; they are colonising the streets and newsstands. But amid this tragicomic cycle of events remains the sobering weight of informed opinion stacking up against it. Opposition voices are pointing out that the cull is a distraction from the real war against TB and that the money could and should be spent on the host of other more effective strategies – biosecurity and further developing and employing TB vaccinations for badgers and cows. In a body blow to the new environment minister, thirty eminent British scientists who work in animal disease treatment and control have sent an open letter to the
Observer
insisting that the government rethinks its strategy immediately, writing that the evidence shows the planned cull may actually risk increasing TB in British cattle.
²
This is because the proposed free-shooting approach (i.e. culling without trapping the badgers first) could encourage the ‘perturbation effect' with badgers roaming from setts into wider areas, potentially spreading the disease into other herds. Under this intense scrutiny, the cull's flaws are revealed. Free-shooting badgers is a cheap option compared with trapping and killing, but it is distinctly unscientific and without control areas, testing or the possibility of statistical analysis. As such, there can be no way of measuring its effectiveness or even determining what percentage of badgers killed has bovine TB. Campaigners claim this is because the data would corroborate the findings of the RCBT and show a low incidence of the disease in badger populations. Most troublesome for Defra, however, seems to be the challenge of meeting the cull's own objectives – namely to kill the requisite minimum of 70 per cent of badgers in the pilot areas. That would require knowledge of how many animals existed before you began and it turns out that nobody has that exact information. Lord Krebs, architect of the RCBT, describes the whole plan as ‘mindless', accusing the government of cherry-picking data to justify an agenda. Lord May, a former chief scientist, agrees, saying: ‘They are transmuting evidence-based policy into policy-based evidence.' The public is rightly suspicious of this all too frequently employed political inversion; it smacks of the tactics the previous Labour government used in the trumped-up case for war in Iraq. And yet the more farcical it all sounds, the more ministers are becoming badger-like, backed into a corner, digging their heels in, bearing their teeth.
There must be a reckoning
, they insist.
And soon
.

‘Maybe you are being too sensitive,' a friend said to me the other day as we talked it over. ‘You've grown soft. It's understandable; you're having a baby any minute.' He was being flippant, teasing, but his words stung me. ‘Sad sentimentality' is an argument that the cull lobby has been quick to smear the opposition with, citing the traditional borders between the removed, sanitised mentality of the town and the harsh but necessary realities of those who deal in country life. But I've known both these worlds, and I've killed animals before, shooting, butchering and eating rabbits and woodpigeon that threatened to overrun a farmer's crop fields. I've felt hearts slow and stop under my fingers and seen eyes set and staring because I chose to pull a trigger. I've watched emaciated red deer stags, ribs poking horribly through fur on a Scottish mountain, starving to death from overpopulation and the human-wrought absence of predators, and I'm certain I would have shot them there and then too, had I been carrying a rifle. I've broken the necks of rabbits squatting swollen and hopeless on footpaths to end the unholy misery of myxomatosis. No, I don't think I'm squeamish; it's true that I've never managed to stop my heart hammering in my chest or shake the repulsion at my own hands for hastening the end of another creature, but that innate displeasure has proved an ethical compass too: I've never killed anything for the sake of it. There's always been a reason. That's what I can't shake about all this mess, that there is such a lack of logic in the sanctioned mass killing of one of Britain's most intriguing wild animals. It's proving damaging for the coalition too. Dragging the badger into the line of fire has had the unintentional outcome of hauling the workings of the government and politicians into the crosshairs. I know I'm not alone in wondering,
If the government is refusing to listen to science and reason, who or what is it listening to? And why?
³

‘Let me be absolutely clear …' the minister had said on the radio. Well, you should be careful what you wish for.

It's still dark through the kitchen window as I pour another coffee and cradle the cup's warmth in both hands. The coughs of starting, stirring traffic sound faintly from the front of the house. I think of Rosie sleeping upstairs and a baby, like the dawn, on the edge of arriving in this world.
But what world are we bringing you into?
It's a thought that has bitten into me many times recently and I feel it sharply again now. There is a consciousness gleaned from time immersed in the edge-land, from being outside the confines; a perspective that comes from being where the historical collisions between human and nature are evident and inescapable, like a movie permanently projected along the borders. Playing on a loop, it whirrs back and forth, showing us what we are and how we came to be thus. The kitchen radio is switched off, but the minister's barking rhetoric still echoes in my ears, jarring and unsettling. His talk of growing ‘rural economies' and making them evermore profitable smacks of a wider addiction to endless growth that doesn't square with the finite resources of this biosphere. There is a debt accumulating that no one wants to address. In its current state our economy already consumes 50 per cent more resources and churns out more waste than ecosystems can restore or absorb. So what will happen if and when that does increase? I think of the phrase I heard a different minister say on the radio many months ago –
anything that cannot justify itself financially has to go.
The second, unspoken part of that being:
anything that can justify itself financially is fair game.
Now, after these many months, I can hear in those words the same cries for ‘improvement' that justified the acts of enclosure in the eighteenth century and, later, monoculture and the intensification of farming. I sense the residual influence of a wealthy minority that has governed this land in various guises since the Normans and whose motivation still appears to be self-interest, self-preservation and power. I feel sorry for farmers at the sharp end with ever-increasing overheads and pressure to produce more, and who are already choked by a consumer society that demands cheaper food yet throws away 30 per cent of what it buys. I feel sorry that they're being driven out of business, ignored, lied to and manipulated, that we all are. And I feel sorry for the other species caught up in it all: the cows bred by artificial insemination for fifty years to yield more milk but that are now weakened against disease; the golden eagles killed to protect industrially farmed pheasant for sport; the pollinators being poisoned by pesticides; the badgers about to be shot for nothing more than political purpose. These things may only be local and small-scale but they form part of a bigger global picture where extinctions, habitat loss and climate destruction are raging unchecked, and where almost half the planet's population of invertebrates has been lost in the last four decades. Maybe I
have
grown sensitive, but only if sensitivity is waking up to the state of things and having a more acute understanding of, and empathy for, the intrinsically valuable and miraculous world we exist in. A world that science and rational thought tell us we're pushing to the edge and well past the point of no return.