walsworth
Journeyman
Completely unnecessary.
Gunman in Cumbria
- Thread starter Harbinger
- Start date
walsworth
Journeyman
Not just my opinion but scientific facts:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/feb/10/badger-culls-fail-spread-cattle-tuberculosis
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/feb/10/badger-culls-fail-spread-cattle-tuberculosis
If someone as eminent as Prof. Donnelly can urge the serious consideration of a vaccination programme for badgers, wtf is the problem with that? The only logical alternative is to shoot every badger within 20 miles of cattle - something that would not only prove impractical, but unethical. The badger is a natural British animal and repeatedly killing it because it is a vector of TB in cattle - only - is as absurd as it is wrong.
Otherwise, vaccinate the bloody cows and put up the price of milk and meat - the former being disgracefully cheap, thanks to the supermarket monopoly on pricing.
Otherwise, vaccinate the bloody cows and put up the price of milk and meat - the former being disgracefully cheap, thanks to the supermarket monopoly on pricing.
walsworth
Journeyman
I'm not sure how you could vaccinate the badgers, how could you catch the little buggers? Cattle on the other hand can be vaccinated, but does it suit vested interests to do so, seeing as they always cry poverty?
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I suggest you work your way through this evidence which will the redress the balance...
http://bovinetb.blogspot.com/
The solution is to test every badger sett to check the status of its occupants healthwise and cull only those that are infected. This is pratically possible, whereas trapping and vaccinating badgers simply isn't. At the same time we continue maintaining rigorous annual bT tests on cattle. That way, the disease eventually will be eliminated while a bovine vaccination is developed - which it hasn't been as yet. By eliminating sick badgers, you then can permit a gradual repopulation by 'clean' ones. Also it's necessary to cull infected deer, as they too carry and spread the disease, although not to the same extent as badgers. Badgers shed infection as much, much higher rates than other mammals - pretty much in the same way that pigs will spread Foot & Mouth much quicker than other cloven hoofed animals.
It's no good saying there should be a vaccination for cattle - there isn't one as yet and the situation simply cannot continue any longer. Farming, while it does indeed receive Single Farm Payments for which you have to perform a whole raft of measures you otherwise commercially simply wouldn't do, also pays out a large amount of money already to maintain animal health status, much of which could have gone towards researcxh for bovine vaccines but which the last government couldn't give a four x about.
So you tell me why we should continue to test our animals annually, pre-movement test them every time we need to move them commerically for any reason, spend serious amounts of money on high selenium mineral additives and yet we cannot prevent this disease appearing in our herds and have to stand by and see our cattle killed? Just why is it in Joe Public's eyes that that is acceptable and yet killing badgers isn't ?
No normal farmer wants to see badgers eliminated permanently (yes, there are farmers who have been under restriction for years who have been unable to operate commercially and can do no more than break even every year who would dearly like to see them gone permanently... not surprising really) but nothing predates a badger other than sickness and Man via road deaths. Badger populations in certain areas are out of hand. I have two fields now which, when we came here 10 years ago, had no setts in but both now have setts which extend way out into the fields and which, legally, I am unable to touch. I can't put mares and foals in either for fear of them putting legs down the holes and, of course, grazing cattle in them is a lottery as to whether or not the badgers are infected. But I need to be able to use those fields - they aren't garden extensions - they need to be able to be commercially viable, so they get electric fencing round them and I keep my fingers crossed the yearlings don't put a foot down any holes which will appear beyond the fence and that's all I can do.
TB is starting to reappear in not only the human population but also both dogs and cats - and horses too. We've let urban foxes get out of hand population wise and badgers are going the same way. Great, do nothing, leave the badger to be able to continue to expand its population levels unchecked - when it becomes a complete pest in urban areas, digging up gardens and infecting domestic pets, Joe Public's tune will soon change...
http://bovinetb.blogspot.com/
The solution is to test every badger sett to check the status of its occupants healthwise and cull only those that are infected. This is pratically possible, whereas trapping and vaccinating badgers simply isn't. At the same time we continue maintaining rigorous annual bT tests on cattle. That way, the disease eventually will be eliminated while a bovine vaccination is developed - which it hasn't been as yet. By eliminating sick badgers, you then can permit a gradual repopulation by 'clean' ones. Also it's necessary to cull infected deer, as they too carry and spread the disease, although not to the same extent as badgers. Badgers shed infection as much, much higher rates than other mammals - pretty much in the same way that pigs will spread Foot & Mouth much quicker than other cloven hoofed animals.
It's no good saying there should be a vaccination for cattle - there isn't one as yet and the situation simply cannot continue any longer. Farming, while it does indeed receive Single Farm Payments for which you have to perform a whole raft of measures you otherwise commercially simply wouldn't do, also pays out a large amount of money already to maintain animal health status, much of which could have gone towards researcxh for bovine vaccines but which the last government couldn't give a four x about.
So you tell me why we should continue to test our animals annually, pre-movement test them every time we need to move them commerically for any reason, spend serious amounts of money on high selenium mineral additives and yet we cannot prevent this disease appearing in our herds and have to stand by and see our cattle killed? Just why is it in Joe Public's eyes that that is acceptable and yet killing badgers isn't ?
No normal farmer wants to see badgers eliminated permanently (yes, there are farmers who have been under restriction for years who have been unable to operate commercially and can do no more than break even every year who would dearly like to see them gone permanently... not surprising really) but nothing predates a badger other than sickness and Man via road deaths. Badger populations in certain areas are out of hand. I have two fields now which, when we came here 10 years ago, had no setts in but both now have setts which extend way out into the fields and which, legally, I am unable to touch. I can't put mares and foals in either for fear of them putting legs down the holes and, of course, grazing cattle in them is a lottery as to whether or not the badgers are infected. But I need to be able to use those fields - they aren't garden extensions - they need to be able to be commercially viable, so they get electric fencing round them and I keep my fingers crossed the yearlings don't put a foot down any holes which will appear beyond the fence and that's all I can do.
TB is starting to reappear in not only the human population but also both dogs and cats - and horses too. We've let urban foxes get out of hand population wise and badgers are going the same way. Great, do nothing, leave the badger to be able to continue to expand its population levels unchecked - when it becomes a complete pest in urban areas, digging up gardens and infecting domestic pets, Joe Public's tune will soon change...
Okay, so there are two distinct issues, which seem to be getting blurred. Badgers' increasing populations and, separately, the possibility of them spreading TB to cattle. Clearly, the latter is a non-issue if a TB vaccination programme was put into force, releasing farmers and DEFRA from very expensive, time-consuming, not to say anxiety-inducing, regular TB testing and the resultant killing of TB-infected cattle. So that would be the TB issue sorted.
The increasing population - or the perception of it - is another issue. Are badgers appearing to increase in numbers, or are they becoming concentrated in some areas due to encroaching urbanisations? Every time a town expands by building light industrial sites, malls, and housing estates, wildlife amenities are lost, driving foxes and badgers to either annoy householders or to increasingly populate dwindling green land.
I'd be interested to know how population figures (which I assume have been collected?) over the past 20-odd years look, given the amount of casual roadkill I see every time I'm outside town. Foxes and their cubs, badgers and their cubs, small deer, all sorts of birds, hedgehogs, squirrels - you name it, someone's blatted it overnight, again and again. There must literally be millions of wild animals splattering car fronts every year. So, with a cull courtesy of motorists, plus the pot-shotting by farmers and assorted poachers and gun-happy kids, 'millions' wouldn't be too far out, I'd venture. How do today's figures stack up against the years when far fewer vehicles were on the roads to take care of random killings, I wonder? And for every suckling vixen, for example, who's killed, probably 3-8 cubs most likely die of starvation back in the den, so the true figure could be inflated further.
We have loads of urban foxes around Brighton - not a problem to anyone. Many people put their leftover food out for them, which is less to go uselessly to landfill. I suppose there'll be mass hysteria now two babies have been bitten by a fox, with calls for a national shoot-out - the usual tabloid-induced frenzy of over-reaction.
Urbanites seem to be considerably more tolerant of their spaces being used nocturnally by foxes and badgers than their rural counterparts. So far as anyone knows, most domestic pets are not being infected by badgers. As for more people having TB, I'd put a lot of that down to the influx of people from countries where that's endemic, such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Middle East, where the disease is rampant in the way that AIDS is in sub-Saharan Africa. Statistics can be useful to a degree, but one needs to see all the details, not just the bald figures, to draw more precise inferences.
The increasing population - or the perception of it - is another issue. Are badgers appearing to increase in numbers, or are they becoming concentrated in some areas due to encroaching urbanisations? Every time a town expands by building light industrial sites, malls, and housing estates, wildlife amenities are lost, driving foxes and badgers to either annoy householders or to increasingly populate dwindling green land.
I'd be interested to know how population figures (which I assume have been collected?) over the past 20-odd years look, given the amount of casual roadkill I see every time I'm outside town. Foxes and their cubs, badgers and their cubs, small deer, all sorts of birds, hedgehogs, squirrels - you name it, someone's blatted it overnight, again and again. There must literally be millions of wild animals splattering car fronts every year. So, with a cull courtesy of motorists, plus the pot-shotting by farmers and assorted poachers and gun-happy kids, 'millions' wouldn't be too far out, I'd venture. How do today's figures stack up against the years when far fewer vehicles were on the roads to take care of random killings, I wonder? And for every suckling vixen, for example, who's killed, probably 3-8 cubs most likely die of starvation back in the den, so the true figure could be inflated further.
We have loads of urban foxes around Brighton - not a problem to anyone. Many people put their leftover food out for them, which is less to go uselessly to landfill. I suppose there'll be mass hysteria now two babies have been bitten by a fox, with calls for a national shoot-out - the usual tabloid-induced frenzy of over-reaction.
Urbanites seem to be considerably more tolerant of their spaces being used nocturnally by foxes and badgers than their rural counterparts. So far as anyone knows, most domestic pets are not being infected by badgers. As for more people having TB, I'd put a lot of that down to the influx of people from countries where that's endemic, such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Middle East, where the disease is rampant in the way that AIDS is in sub-Saharan Africa. Statistics can be useful to a degree, but one needs to see all the details, not just the bald figures, to draw more precise inferences.
Desert Orchid
Senior Jockey
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2005
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- 25,034
But 87.3% of statistics are plucked out of thin air.
Right - if you want to know more about why there isn't a bovine vaccination (yet) against bTB, read on:
http://www.defra.gov.uk/foodfarm/farmanimal/diseases/atoz/tb/documents/vaccine_cattle.pdf
That should give you some decent bedtime reading!
http://www.defra.gov.uk/foodfarm/farmanimal/diseases/atoz/tb/documents/vaccine_cattle.pdf
That should give you some decent bedtime reading!
jinnyj
Senior Jockey
- Joined
- Jan 8, 2004
- Messages
- 4,569
Jules - with you every word - we are seriously over-run with badgers down here and there isn't a day goes by without another knocked over on the roads something you hardly used to see. My near neighbour lost 7 of his alpacas this winter due to reacting positively to TB test and he has a new badger sett on his land.
What I want to know (having heard about the no-bovine vaccine before a few times) is why there isn't a TB vaccination programme for badgers, in the same way as we had an anti-rabies vaccine for dogs in Africa?* It seems logical that if you know a certain animal is a vector for a particular disease, rather than eradicate the animal from the face of the earth, eradicate the disease. Or is that really beyond the wit and will of today's medical faculty?
*Dogs had to be vaccinated annually and wear a collar with a disc for that year showing their rabies vaccination number. If your dog got loose without a collar or an undisced collar, it was held for a few days, then killed. That concentrated the minds of the careless, although it didn't entirely prevent rabies, since someone my Mother knew died, mad and raving from it, having rescued what he thought was a drowning German Shepherd from his swimming pool. The worst offenders were African villagers who kept their hunting dogs hidden when the regional veterinary came to call, even though the vaccinations for them were free.
*Dogs had to be vaccinated annually and wear a collar with a disc for that year showing their rabies vaccination number. If your dog got loose without a collar or an undisced collar, it was held for a few days, then killed. That concentrated the minds of the careless, although it didn't entirely prevent rabies, since someone my Mother knew died, mad and raving from it, having rescued what he thought was a drowning German Shepherd from his swimming pool. The worst offenders were African villagers who kept their hunting dogs hidden when the regional veterinary came to call, even though the vaccinations for them were free.
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Honestly Kri, I've given you two links to wade through, both containinn the relevant info.
There IS a badger vaccine but it doesn't work on already infected badgers, isn't 100% effective anyway and to be even halfway effective, all badgers would have to be innoculated.
So who is going to do that ? There's a trial near me in Tiveron, everyone was jolly gung ho about the concept until the practicalities were examined. Farmers don't have the time to do it, the money offered by DEATHRA to contractors wasn't anywhere near enough, the actual mechanics of trying to trap badgers is horrific and, as pointed out on TBblogspot, when you trap an infected badger with no outward symptoms and stress it, then vaccinate it (which will have sfa effect) that badger will shed the virus at an even higher rate.
Complete waste of tax payers money - knee jerk reaction to the badger huggers pre-election (well, that worked well - not!) without proper thought about the practicalities.
Culling infected setts (and there is a very quick, cheap and easy sett test to determine whether or not they are diseased) and continuing to cull on a sensible, humane basis (which is where the Krebs research falls over, because the population control isn't maintained) in bTB hotspots, with farmers continuing to do their bit and test annually and then you will achieve a bTB free status which can be maintained and where healthy badgers are also properly protected against contraxting the disease,
There IS a badger vaccine but it doesn't work on already infected badgers, isn't 100% effective anyway and to be even halfway effective, all badgers would have to be innoculated.
So who is going to do that ? There's a trial near me in Tiveron, everyone was jolly gung ho about the concept until the practicalities were examined. Farmers don't have the time to do it, the money offered by DEATHRA to contractors wasn't anywhere near enough, the actual mechanics of trying to trap badgers is horrific and, as pointed out on TBblogspot, when you trap an infected badger with no outward symptoms and stress it, then vaccinate it (which will have sfa effect) that badger will shed the virus at an even higher rate.
Complete waste of tax payers money - knee jerk reaction to the badger huggers pre-election (well, that worked well - not!) without proper thought about the practicalities.
Culling infected setts (and there is a very quick, cheap and easy sett test to determine whether or not they are diseased) and continuing to cull on a sensible, humane basis (which is where the Krebs research falls over, because the population control isn't maintained) in bTB hotspots, with farmers continuing to do their bit and test annually and then you will achieve a bTB free status which can be maintained and where healthy badgers are also properly protected against contraxting the disease,
No vaccine assists anything already infected as it's a preventative, not a curative, application. And we're told by doctors that no vaccine is ever 100% effective - when we had polio jabs at school, we were told that and firmly kept our fingers crossed we wouldn't be in the ineffective percentile! Same with any jabs you get prior to wandering into medically hostile areas - yellow fever, typhoid, tetanus - they're only about 60% effective, or only for short periods of time. And yes, all badgers would have to be inoculated, the same way all people travelling to certain countries have to be inoculated, so that they don't import foreign viruses and lay waste to their countrymen on return. So I do understand a bit about vaccination programmes.
I'd have thought that by now the TB vaccine could be hypodermically applied to cubs and also put into attractive food for all the badgers to eat, in the way that polio vaccine was eventually taken out of the syringe and more invitingly put onto sugar cubes for children to eat. If we can kill rats by poisoning their food, or conversely help sick pets get better by putting their medications into it, I can't see why feeding the vaccine to badger setts is such a big deal.
As for the practicalities, where there's a will, there's a way. I imagine this is a question of lack of will, with the ineffective method of killing them prevailing because it's the cheap option. It has to be ineffective, or else badgers wouldn't continue to be TB vectors. I'm sure that the tens of thousands of badgers due for the chop in Wales aren't all TB-positive by any means, so it looks like a draconian method to please the anti-badger brigade. It's the Agent Orange approach to a problem - wipe out as much as you can in an area.
I'd have thought that by now the TB vaccine could be hypodermically applied to cubs and also put into attractive food for all the badgers to eat, in the way that polio vaccine was eventually taken out of the syringe and more invitingly put onto sugar cubes for children to eat. If we can kill rats by poisoning their food, or conversely help sick pets get better by putting their medications into it, I can't see why feeding the vaccine to badger setts is such a big deal.
As for the practicalities, where there's a will, there's a way. I imagine this is a question of lack of will, with the ineffective method of killing them prevailing because it's the cheap option. It has to be ineffective, or else badgers wouldn't continue to be TB vectors. I'm sure that the tens of thousands of badgers due for the chop in Wales aren't all TB-positive by any means, so it looks like a draconian method to please the anti-badger brigade. It's the Agent Orange approach to a problem - wipe out as much as you can in an area.
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That's what happens when you introduce knee jerk laws which equally blanket protects a species because of those disgusting folk who actively promoted badger baiting. That's why they became a protected species. If they had looked at it a different way and pursued the people doing it more effectively and with better laws that effectively punished and deterred the culprits, badger culling on a lower and more sensible scale would have continued as it always did and bTB wouldn't have got the hold it did with vectors as efficients as badgers unfortunately are being able to expand exponentially.
However, I am now off to Royal Cornwall show with my truly beautiful cattle, which is how I get to have some holiday. And I hope to enjoy this activity while I can, because every time we pre-movement test, there's a strong possibility we'll get a reactor and then I won't have that enjoyment for an unspecified length of time, I maybe even won't have those animals who I have a special bond with and I could be one of those farmers who have to watch them loaded onto the lorry destined for slaughter.
So sorry, but if it means that in areas where bTb is out of control, where we know of at least five farmers who have committed suicided because they simply can't see any light at the end of their dark tunnel and left young families behind, then if the badgers in that area have to be shot in order for healthy badgers to be allowed to repopulate, then it's fine by me and my conscience is crystal clear. I've forwarded the evidence I've based my opinion on and, being on the edge of a viscious hotspot here, I believe it's the only way to go now. Oopinions obviously aren't going to change so carry on, by all means but I'm done!
However, I am now off to Royal Cornwall show with my truly beautiful cattle, which is how I get to have some holiday. And I hope to enjoy this activity while I can, because every time we pre-movement test, there's a strong possibility we'll get a reactor and then I won't have that enjoyment for an unspecified length of time, I maybe even won't have those animals who I have a special bond with and I could be one of those farmers who have to watch them loaded onto the lorry destined for slaughter.
So sorry, but if it means that in areas where bTb is out of control, where we know of at least five farmers who have committed suicided because they simply can't see any light at the end of their dark tunnel and left young families behind, then if the badgers in that area have to be shot in order for healthy badgers to be allowed to repopulate, then it's fine by me and my conscience is crystal clear. I've forwarded the evidence I've based my opinion on and, being on the edge of a viscious hotspot here, I believe it's the only way to go now. Oopinions obviously aren't going to change so carry on, by all means but I'm done!