The Badger Cull

Protect the Wild is totally opposed to the badger ‘cull’ (and note, we dislike the term ‘cull’ being used at all as it is being used to give scientific validity to the killing of a protected species on behalf of the dairy industry) because badgers are an essential part of natural ecosytems and should be allowed to live out their lives without persecution of any sort.

• Badgers shouldn’t be killed to protect the dairy industry. Badgers are intelligent, sentient animals that have lived here for thousands of years. We are already one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, slaughtering these animals to protect an industry that has its own cruelty and animal welfare issues to deal with (let alone problems with lax biosecurity) is unconscionable.
• It’s inhumane. In 2021 the number of badgers free shot – meaning shot when free running rather than shot when caged and trapped – reached a record 87.7% – nearly 9 out of 10. Experts have said that badgers shot this way could take minutes to bleed out and die.
• There are alternatives. The industry needs to fix its bio security, stop moving infected dairy cows around the country, and work to stop cattle-to-cattle transmission – not demonise badgers. 
• The ‘cull’ has greenlighted illegal badger killing. The NFU and the shooting industry has taken the ‘cull’ to be a greenlight to exterminate the badger. No one has any idea how many badgers are dying on farmland outside the so-called cull zones, or how many woodlands have been cleared of badgers by shoots who claim they take pheasant eggs. Eyewitness monitor and sab reports paint a terrible picture though.
• The UK badger population is internationally important. Before the killing began the UK was said to hold a quarter of all of Europe’s badgers. Destroying so many animals is not only immoral but doesn’t make sense from a conservation perspective.

A targetted cull in Pembrokeshire in Wales began in 2009, and was cancelled in 2012 afer the Welsh Labour administration concluded that culling was ineffective.

The cull as we know it began as a trial in October 2013 in two pilot areas in west Gloucestershire and west Somerset.

The main aim was to assess the humaneness of culling using “free shooting” (shooting badgers in the field). The trials were repeated in 2014 and 2015, and has now been expanded across huge areas of England.

The current badger cull in England was a commitment in the Conservative party election manifesto in 2010, and has been underway since 2013.  Then Prime Minister Boris Johnson  indicated in 2020 that any future culling of badgers would be in ‘exceptional’ circumstances only, but in March 2024 the Sunak government announced proposals for ‘epi culling’. This would see the extermination of the vast majority of badger populations across much of south-west and central England and as many as half a million badgers killed by 2038.

Badgers are secretive and difficult to survey. Estimates of the number of badgers in pre-cull England range somewhere between 391,000-581,000.

The same goes for the ‘cull’. No one can be certain cullers and shooters are accurately reporting the number of badgers that have been killed but it’s thought that up to 250,000 badgers had been killed by the end of 2023.

No, there is no evidence that the cull is working.

Since the government’s badger culling in England began in 2013 there has been:

• No reduction in bovine TB 

• No independent peer-reviewed scientific research to prove that badger culling is lowering bovine TB in cattle.

Defra’s push to prove that badger culling alone is responsible for reducing bTB incidents in cattle is misleading. Improved bTB testing, cattle movement controls and increased biosecurity measures will be key factors in lowering the spread of bTB in and around the cull zones.

All the evidence says that it is cattle that is spreading bovine TB to other cattle.

 There is a huge amount of scientific evidence and field studies to show that the vast majority of bTB infection in cattle is a result of cow-to-cow infection. 

 In almost all cases of the disease it was proved that cattle spread bovine TB to other cattle within intensive dairy and beef production systems.

The bacteria that causes the disease spills over into the wider environment as a form of industrial pollution through faeces and slurry soil, water, organisms and infecting both wild and domestic animals. 

No. Very few badgers killed in the cull are ever tested, but of the ones that are the overwhelming majority of culled badgers have been bTB free and perfectly healthy. Their removal will have had zero impact on lowering bTB in cattle.

​Of 102,349 badgers killed under cull licences 2013-2019, just over 900 were subject to post mortems and tests for bovine TB. Of this number less than 5% were found to have bovine TB to a degree where they posed a risk of infecting other badgers or possibly cattle.

Yes, culling does cause badgers to suffer – and that’s been known for years.

The claim that ‘half of all badgers’ have been killed in the cull is unintentionally  misleading, and using that ‘statistic’ opens campaigners up to charges of not ‘understanding the science’.

Estimating the number of badgers in England has always been difficult. They are nocturnal, setts cover large areas so there is the chance of under- or over-counting in some areas, and there are badgers living in areas that are not regularly surveyed if at all.

However if we estimate that there were around 450,000 badgers before the cull began in 2013 and that around 260,000 had been killed by the end of 2023, then that would be the equivalent of half the population of badgers that there were at the start of the cull.

But we would be failing to take into account the fact that badger populations are dynamic, that badgers are moving from unculled areas into areas where territories have now become available, and despite the cull badgers are still breeding. Reproductive strategy in mammals is extremely complex, but it’s also true that females tend to produce more young (and those young survive better) in situations where there is less competition.

In effect, while the cull temporarily removes badgers from an area, unless every single badger in the British Isles is wiped out, badgers will find each other, will find places to raise young, and populations – over time – will start to rebuild.

In fact in some early cull areas where culling is no longer taking place, badgers have returned and are breeding again.

The fact that badgers are returning to culled areas makes the cull even more nonsensical and futile, and why using the ‘half of all badgers killed’ statistic is actually unhelpful and inaccurate.