Government's badger cull plan is 'deeply flawed', damning report warns

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Government experts based the British badger cull on a 'confused and misguided' interpretation of science, a damning report sent to MPs has concluded.

< p>Call for immediate policy overhaul, study says officials have taken an 'ineffective and misguided approach' to tackling TB in dairy cows, leading to a policy that is 'a self-perpetuating failure' .

But the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has hit back, saying the authors of the report are not independent and claiming that they themselves are not properly applying science.

(Getty Images/iStockphoto)

According to official figures, the fight against bovine tuberculosis in England costs taxpayers an estimated £70m a year and dairy farmers an additional £50m.

At least 33,627 badgers were killed last year in an attempt to eradicate the disease, which bringing the total to 210,555 since culling began in 2013, meaning up to half of Britain's badger population has been killed, according to the Badger Trust.

The government claims that the incidence of tuberculosis in cattle in culling areas has halved after four years of culling.

But the authors of the new report, who include veteran biologist and campaigner Tom Langton and Paul Torgerson, a professor of veterinary epidemiology, as well as badger researchers, accuse the government of "systematically distorting" some of the science.

The study accuses the Agency of animal and plant health to revert to the "old thinking" of the 1980s that badgers are responsible for most TB epidemics", which defies available evidence and is anathema to any correct application of modern disease epidemiology. diseases".

"APHA's (and by extension the government's) interpretation of the available evidence on the epidemiology of TB is confusing and flawed," he said.

“This review reveals that there has been an accumulation of assumptions and errors over the past decade.

The report concludes that the culling is "a self-perpetuating failure".