Ever decreasing circles

We have not posted anything on this site for six months, mainly because what we are seeing and hearing, reading and growling over is repeated guff. Rinse and repeat, ad infinitum. Hence the headline - Ever decreasing circles.

Even this week, the Guardian  has the headline, 'Badger culls do not prevent cattle TB'. Really?

Of course what they should have said was half hearted political culls, reduce, but do not clear zoonotic TB from cattle. Historic data shows the effects of a cull in graphic detail:

And our Parliamentary Questions, almost two decades ago gave an unequivocal answer to the question, just why was Thornbury so successful?

"The fundamental difference between the Thornbury area and other areas in south west England, where bovine tuberculosis was a problem was the systematic removal of badgers from the Thornbury area. No other species was removed. No other contemporaneous change was identified that could have accounted for the reduction in TB incidence within the area." [157949] 24th March 2004. Col. 824W 

'Reduction' is a huge understatement there, because NO cases of TB in cattle were found in at least a decade after the badger clearance.

The RBCT, on which the current culls were based, was a shambles. And never expected to deliver anything other than that which its political masters intended.  And its master in chief, one Professor John Bourne said exactly that  to the Efra Committee in 2007, with what was described as a 'smirk' on his face. 

Taking out 70 per cent of badgers, from 70 per cent of disparate patches of land, some with 'No Entry' signs, was never going to be the whole and complete solution. But it survived Judicial Reviews and farmers put their collective hands in pockets and after a couple of pilot schemes, the cull areas were off. It has been observed that with hard boundaries of for example, the coast, or indeed another cull area, success was increased substantially. 

Management of a TB infected wildlife population cannot be abandoned when it affects our cattle and many other mammals. Our industry has invested too much in the face of misplaced anthropomorphic sentimentalism and unchallenged, downright lies.

Even now, our current Secretary of State, the echo chamber that is George Eustice is prattling on about vaccinating badgers.  Why? His own department has spent oodles of taxpayer's money   doing just that and found it has had no effect of cattle TB whatsoever. (That link also has reference to the Brunton report, which logs impressive data from the cull areas.)

But we digress. The exudate from a vaccinated badger, a unique Danish strain of m.bovis, only used in badger vaccines,  and available for over 300 days after administration, has killed at least one cat. 

To re-phrase that, one cat that has been examined, its TB riddled body pm'd, lesions spoligotyped and papers written up and published. There may be more.

And so the circles continue. We wrote in 2006 about Bronze Age burial mound  at Brownslade, Pembrokeshire, being excavated. And again in 2016 similar sacrilege inflicted on a graveyard. Now the same thing is happening in Dudley,  where an 88 year old pensioner is finding human bones, including skulls, gathered from a nearby graveyard, scattered across her garden, the Telegraph reports. 

This overgrown rat, with a white stripe down its face has acquired more 'rights' than the rest of us put together. Unwelcome, but untouchable. Unmoveable. 

While researching this catch up posting, I came across a piece we published last year, comparing this country to a banana republic and if you follow the money trail of repeated 'research', obfuscation and downright lies told by successive administrations concerning zoonotic tuberculosis, now hanging on the coat tails of climate change, (kill a cow - fly a plane?) the conclusion can only be that we are there. 

Enjoy.