Both before and after the General Election, Protect the Wild has been asking the Labour Party to keep its promise to end the ‘ineffective’ badger cull. With Natural England rushing through new licences in May (presumably anticipating the ousting of the pro-cull Tory government) it’s likely that as many as 250,000 badgers – the vast majority of them healthy – will have been killed by the end of this year to protect the dairy industry.
Disappointingly, the new Labour government has been reluctant to revoke those new licences, noting potential legal challenges. However, a far more serious ‘challenge’ to the licences has now been issued: an analysis of the 2006 Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT) which has been used for almost two decades to justify killing badgers. Published in Scientific Reports the report concludes that:
“…there is evidence that a controversial, expensive and disruptive programme of badger culling in England since 2013 has an inadequate scientific basis…Our results suggest that if alternative models had been analysed at the time, then great caution would have been given to concluding that badger culling has an effect on the herd incidence of bTB, whether “confirmed” or otherwise.”
Little wonder the cull is ‘ineffective’.
Written by Professor Paul Torgerson (Chair, Veterinary Epidemiology, University of Zurich) and colleagues including The Badger Crowd’s Tom Langton, ‘Absence of effects of widespread badger culling on tuberculosis in cattle’ is not a simple read. It uses the complex language of statistical modelling but as Tom Langton himself says in a must-read discussion about the report on The Badger Crowd, it found that “most standard analytical options did not show any evidence to support an effect of badger culling on bovine TB in cattle.”.
“The most likely explanation for the difference in result from the different analyses is that the RBCT proactive cull analysis ‘overfitted’ the data and used a non-standard method to control for disease exposure. The result is that the original model had a poor predictive value, i.e. it was not useful in predicting the results of badger culling. The more appropriate models in the latest study strongly suggest that badger culling does not bring about the disease reduction reported.”
