Council reaffirms opposition to badger culling

A council has reaffirmed its opposition to badger culling as a means of eradicating bovine tuberculosis (TB).

Oxfordshire County Council last year voted to end badger culling on council-owned land.

Lib Dem and Green councillors had branded the practice as "inhumane" while opposition councillors said it could be effective in tackling bovine TB.

The government said it was working on a TB eradication package which included establishing a new field force to "increase badger vaccination at pace".

The government announced last year that badger culling would end in England within five years, with the aim of eradicating bovine TB by 2038.

As part of a new strategy, badgers will be vaccinated instead of killed and work to develop a separate vaccine for livestock will also be stepped up.

Speaking at a cabinet meeting to review the council's decision in December to ban culling on its land, Greens group leader Ian Middleton said that "hundreds of thousands of badgers, including over 8,000 in Oxfordshire, have been needlessly killed and injured using public funds" since 2018.

He insisted the policy was "not about disadvantaging farmers" but said culling "has been shown not to be an effective measure in controlling bovine TB".

"The focus should instead be on better herd-based measures and accurate forms of testing which can control the disease more humanely and far more effectively," he said.

"We simply can't go on destroying our wildlife forever."

A council report stated that the among the agricultural land the council owns or leases, there were three tenants who keep beef cattle and no land was used for dairy farming.

Council leader Liz Leffman said she had written to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) expressing the council's continued opposition to the cull.

Speaking at the main council debate on the issue in December, Conservative opposition councillor Nick Field-Johnson argued that in certain circumstances there was no alternative to badger culling.

He said: "It has been clearly shown that allowing culling where the disease remains a major problem has been effective in cutting back on TB."

The NFU previously said the new government strategy should not overlook "tried, tested and successful disease control".

Defra said it was working to roll out a TB eradication package "that will allow us to end the badger cull and stop the spread of this horrific disease".

The strategy includes a national wildlife surveillance programme to better understand the disease in populations and a new Badger Vaccinator Field Force to increase badger vaccinations.

"TB has devastated British farmers and wildlife for far too long, costs taxpayers more than £100m every year has taken a terrible toll on our badger populations," it said.

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