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

Discovery of potentially Earth-like planet Proxima b raises hopes for life

The search for life outside our solar system has been brought to our cosmic doorstep with the discovery of an apparently rocky planet orbiting the nearest star to our sun.

Thought to be at least 1.3 times the mass of the Earth, the planet lies within the so-called “habitable zone” of the star Proxima Centauri, meaning that liquid water could potentially exist on the newly discovered world.

Analysis Proxima b will be our prime laboratory in the search for extraterrestrial life

The discovery of a rocky planet in the habitable zone around our sun’s nearest star is just the beginning of decades of intense research and exploration

 

Read more

Named Proxima b, the new planet has sparked a flurry of excitement among astrophysicists, with the tantalising possibility that it might be similar in crucial respects to Earth.

“There is a reasonable expectation that this planet might be able to host life, yes,” said Guillem Anglada-Escudé, co-author of the research from Queen Mary, University of London.-read more

Marine biologist Chris Brown, who works at the Sea Life Adventure Park in Weymouth, spotted the heavily-pregnant male Spiny Seahorse last weekend.

The Spiny Seahorse, which is also known by the scientific name Hippocampus guttulatus, is the largest of the two native species to the British Isles.

It is listed as vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List.read more

food banks

its a sad sign of the times that people need to go too food banks due to lack of cash or other hardships .yet to my surprise and disbelief people rather starve due to the stigma or too proud to ask both stupid reasons in my book,as if you need food to keep going and the reasons mentioned don't put food on your plate.so make a leap of faith and find out who too contact in your local area and get a voucher and go ,one is in holsworthy and yes i have needed it myself.

i can book you i am a librarian.

a strange headline you may think but thetford council are going to use a 6 month trial to use library staff to help people fill in online forms to report offences directly to norfolk police force ,these trails start in thetford and gorleston next month .

Bagpipe lung can kill you, scientists warn

Wind instrument players are being warned by doctors over possible lung damage after a bagpipe player is believed to have died from a reaction to mouldy pipes.

Doctors writing in the journal Thorax have said instruments should be cleaned regularly to avoid "bagpipe lung".

Dr Jenny King, a member of the team at Wythenshawe Hospital in Manchester that treated the piper, told the BBC that if caught early, similar problems could be treated with a good prognosis.

READ MORE

Scottish village in Italy where residents wear kilts and play bagpipes

The 61-year-old patient described in the journal practised every day and had been ill for a number of years.

Doctors realised the bagpipes might have been the cause of the problems when he travelled abroad for a few months without his instrument and his condition improved.-read more

pigtails to be tested

these are the pigtails believed to have belonged to the mutineers on hms bounty and are going to gett tested for d.n.a in london.