50 years. A tale of Ministerial failure - in pictures.

 

 We first published this posting in 2012, but as 2021 looms, it will be 50 years since a tuberculous badger was found and post mortemed in a Glos. on a farm where repeated tests and slaughter were failing to clear the cattle herd of zoonotic Tuberculosis.

 Using their own maps, we will track the disgraceful decline of this country's so-called TB eradication programme.



After the Attested herds scheme of the 1950s and 60s, we were so nearly TB free. But a couple of 'hotspots' remained, which finally responded to parallel action on badgers after the mid 1970s.

Farmers controlled badger numbers.

The Protection of Badgers Act (1972) meant that any population control, for any reason, was by license only. MAFF controlled badgers " to prevent the spread of disease".

 And in 1986,  where at least one confirmed TB reactor had triggered annual tests for the parish,  the maps looked like this.

513 reactor cattle were slaughtered in 1986.

After 1986, the real decline began, as gassing of a complete group of badgers implicated in cattle breakdowns by MAFF, was replaced with cage traps and shooting - of those that hadn't been released or moved.

But the big change was the land allocated to the Ministry wildlife teams. This was reduced during the Interim Strategy  operating 1988 - 97 from 7km down to just 1km and then only on land cattle had grazed.
All arable, woodland or neighbouring land was out of bounds to the wildlife teams - if not badgers..

Over the same period badger numbers were estimated to have increased by 77 per cent per decade.

 The 1996 map tells its own story of expanding hotspots.

3,881 cattle were slaughtered in 1996.

In 1997, the then Labour government accepted a £1m bung from the Political Animal Lobby (PAL), and a moratorium was introduced overnight on Section 10 (2) of the Protection of Badgers Act.

No licenses were issued to "prevent the spread of disease".
Two years later, the number of cattle slaughtered had doubled.

The moratorium is still in place.

 The 2006 map shows hotspots expanding like Topsy.

 MAFF was now been re invented as DEFRA.

22,282 cattle were slaughtered in 2006.

After the end of the Badger Dispersal Trial  RBCT in 2006, Defra cracked down hard on cattle movements and ramped up testing.

 Pre movement testing was introduced in a valiant attempt to find this hidden reservoir of Tuberculosis in cattle.

The 2011 map showed the annual testing area as solid red, increased by several miles from Defra's original 2010 model. As far as badger could walk?


34,617 cattle were slaughtered in 2011.

Fast forward to the 2012 announcement of several new annual testing areas.

Please excuse the home made map - but as you can see, many buffer counties and those with sporadic and expanding problems now require annual tests and preMT of their cattle.

No action on badgers.

In 2012, there were 4919 new herd incidents and Defra slaughtered 37,734 animals.

 
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We think the new format of Defra's maps looks a tad truncated. In fact, very odd. We prefer the old GB format.

Wales has devolved completely - as have its figures in most of the press reports. And Scotland's head is removed.

Nevertheless the GB map, minus its top and left side, we print here - straight from Defra's new 2013 pdf file,
which explains their new cattle measures.

Still nothing on badgers at all. And the cattle killing goes on with much enthusiasm.

Thus a sobering fact is that almost 50 years ago when that first TB infected badger was formally identified in 1971, the incidence of cattle reactors in Britain was 0.045%, with 1,834 cattle slaughtered under TB orders.

This was before badgers were made a protected species and any action had been taken to control them due to zTB.

In Great Britain, during the 12 months to April 2020 Defra slaughtered 40,487 cattle under TB orders associated with 3,972 new outbreaks. 

In fact this country (GB) has been slaughtering around 30,000 to 40,000 cattle each year for the last 10 years associated with 4,000 to 5,000 new TB outbreaks annually. 

 So, by giving infected badgers the ultimate cult status, and their ancestral home a grade 1 listing, it is readily apparent that we are now in a far worse situation than we were more than 50 years ago. And it would be naive to assume that badgers with advanced tuberculous did not suffer from this disease.

More on this from a group of veterinary surgeons, veterinary pathologists and others who worked on this disease during the 1970s and 1980s - and almost had it beaten - can be read in the Veterinary Record.

Meanwhile, our graph, prepared a few years ago now, shows the numbers of cattle slaughtered in relation to the dumbing down, and finally abandonment, of any semblance of badger control in response to outbreaks of zTB in cattle herds in Great Britain.

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