Badger culls to be extended to North Devon

BADGER culls will soon be taking place in North Devon according to the BBC.

It is believed shooting will start at the beginning of September.

North Devon is among five regions believed to have been chosen for new culls including South Devon, North Cornwall, West Dorset and South Herefordshire.

The Government has a 25-year-strategy in place to eradicate bovine TB, culling is one element of that strategy.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has neither confirmed or denied these areas will be the next to see culls but told the BBC it was looking at applications for new badger control licences.

However the BBC has reported culling companies have already been chosen and marksmen have been trained for new areas.

The precise locations of where culls will take place have in the past not been revealed because of the controversy surrounding the policy and the potential for attempts to be made by protesters to thwart any shooting.Responding to reports a decision has been made to extend the badger culls in areas like North Devon the CEO of the Badger Trust, Dominic Dyer, said: "After four years of badger culling no one can now doubt that the policy has been a disastrous failure on scientific, cost and humaneness grounds.

"For the new Defra Secretary Andrea Leadsom to ignore the facts and extend this policy into five new areas of the country defies belief.

"The badger cull is built on three pillars of sand, incompetence, negligence and deceit, and will ultimately collapse because it fails to address the key cause of bovine TB, which is cattle to cattle infection.

"We could kill every badger in England but bovine TB would continue to spread in cattle herds, due to inaccurate TB testing, excessive numbers of cattle movements and poor bio-security controls."

The chairman of the Badger Trust, Peter Martin, said: "The badger is being used as a scapegoat for failures in the modern intensive livestock industry that have led to a significant increase in bovine TB in cattle herds.

"Recent changes to the cull licencing regime have made it clear this policy is now just a numbers game based on indiscriminate and untargeted killing of this protected wildlife species.

"They have abandoned any pretence of science or control.

"We now have conclusive scientific evidence proving beyond doubt that badgers actively avoid cattle in pasture and farm yards, and that cattle avoid feeding on grass where badgers urinate or defecate.

"This effectively means that the likelihood of badgers passing TB to cattle within the farming environment is so low that it is impossible to distinguish it from any other potential environmental vector, including cattle themselves."

He added: "By extending the badger culls to five new areas of the country the taxpayer is now facing a bill in the region of £100 million by 2020 on a policy which will fail to deliver any significant reduction in bovine TB for livestock farmers."save the innocent badger