DEFRA to hand taxpayer cash to NFU for badger vaccination study

The government is absurdly funding a pro-cull organisation that is skeptical about badger vaccination to carry out a vaccination study project

Over the last decade, successive governments have used around £22 million of taxpayers' money to facilitate the largely inhumane killing of more than 230,000 badgers for a 'crime' no-one is certain they have committed. Now, the government is apparently on course to hand £1.4m more in public cash to one of the badger cull's biggest cheerleaders, the National Farmers Union, ostensibly to help stop the killing. Sound absurd? That's because it is.

After promising to end the "ineffective" badger cull in its 2024 election manifesto, the Labour government announced a new "TB eradication strategy" in September. This is the disease that badgers are being slaughtered over, as they are blamed for spreading bovine tuberculosis (bTB) to cows.

Contrary to what voters would likely have expected, the minister for food security and rural affairs, Daniel Zeichner, has said the strategy "will allow us to end the badger cull by the end of this parliament." In other words, the government is not planning to end "ineffective" badger culling imminently. Rather, the killing could continue for the entire duration of the government's term in office.

The government's bTB eradication strategy includes two measures focused on badger vaccination: The establishment of a "Badger Vaccinator Field Force" and the initiation of a badger vaccination study.

On 30 January, the National Farmers' Union (NFU) revealed that it is on course to receive public monies to carry out the badger vaccination study, in partnership with the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). Specifically, the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) is planning to award £1.4m to the NFU and ZSL for a study project in South-West England.

In the arrangement, landowners and farming industry representatives will trap badgers on farms and ZSL will provide a team to vaccinate them, while also training others to do the same. Additionally, the project will involve some surveying of badger population sizes and experimentation with how often they are vaccinated to determine affordable and effective ways to vaccinate badgers against bTB.

It's not the badgers

The government intends badger vaccination to be built up as an effective alternative to culling. The idea being that if badgers are a significant cause of bTB in cows, vaccinating them will make badger populations immune to bTB and end that allegedly important transmission pathway.

The big problem with this premise is that evidence increasingly shows badgers not to be a significant driver of bTB in cows. Rather, evidence reveals that cows are the key driver of bTB in cows, through passing it to each other. This is in part due to inefficient bTB testing that does not identify all diseased individuals in a cow herd, so they are essentially a source of infection that flies under the radar. Consequently, this research points to cattle-focused measures, such as stricter testing and biosecurity, as the most effective way to control bTB – not focusing on badgers.

As conservation ecologist Tom Langton, who has been involved with some of the above-mentioned research, has put it:

" If badger culling doesn’t work, then there’s no reason why badger vaccination should work, because it’s not the badgers."

Unfortunately, the growing body of research that shows badgers not to be an important driver of bTB in cows is often attacked or sidelined.

Badger blaming

The association that DEFRA plans to fund to do the badger vaccination study – the NFU – is chief among the critics of findings that show badger culling to be (in Labour's words) ineffective.

For instance, NFU chief Tom Bradshaw branded the BBC's decision to air the documentary Brian May – The Badgers, the Farmers, and Me as "irresponsible." This documentary is a case study of Gatcombe Farm, where investigations into the causes of its chronically infected herd revealed cow-to-cow transmission, typically via dung, to be the core problem. As Anne Brummer, CEO of the Save Me Trust, which carried out the research, explained at the time:

"Our research demonstrates that it's possible to manage bovine TB within your herd without worrying about an infected badger population. It's shocking that over 230,000 badgers have been killed based on flawed science."

Nonetheless, Bradshaw spoke out against the public broadcaster's airing of the documentary, citing the “proven role badgers play in the cycle of infection on farms.”

Commonly, farming entities like the NFU and the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) point to a select few studies when making their badger-blaming claims. For instance, in its response to a 2024 consultation on a now scrapped badger culling plan, the AHDB asserted that there is "strong evidence" that "the reduction of badger numbers in England has significantly reduced the level of bovine TB breakdowns" in cow herds. It continued:

"The most recent paper published in the journal Nature in March 2024 showed a 56% reduction in new herd breakdowns, attributed to badger culling."

The cited paper was produced by researchers at the Animal and Plant Health Agency, which is an agency of DEFRA. As Protect the Wild has pointed out, this study explicitly does not 'attribute' the reduction in new herd breakdowns, meaning newly found bTB infections in herds, to badger culling.

In the study's focus areas, measures to tackle bTB included badger culling and cow-focused activities, such as a bTB testing regime. As a result, the study itself acknowledged that its analysis "cannot explicitly distinguish the effects of the BCP’s [Badger Control Policy] component measures" from other measures, such as those focused on cows.

Morally and environmentally indefensible

Simply put, entities like the NFU and AHDB claim there is certainty that badgers play a role in bTB transmission, where there is none. Indeed, a 2022 study by Langton and other researchers found that the patterns in bTB reductions in cows across areas with and without badger culling revealed reductions to be most likely due to cow-focused measures.

By running a badger vaccination study project, and putting the NFU at its helm, DEFRA is further cementing the idea that badgers are to blame.

Moreover, in its announcement on the vaccination project funding, the NFU stated that the association "is clear that badger vaccination cannot be used as a direct alternative to culling." In other words, DEFRA is funding a vaccination skeptic to run its vaccination study. This will make it all the harder to bring the cull to an end.

Aside from badger vaccination measures, the government's bTB eradication strategy includes carrying out a badger population survey and a wildlife surveillance programme. These are welcome measures, considering that previous governments have killed badgers en masse with little meaningful regard to the impact on their populations and without examining whether bTB is even prevalent in targeted badgers.

What the strategy apparently fails to do, however, is examine the moral and environmental aspects of badger culling. As Protect the Wild has reported, the impact of the mass slaughter of badgers on England's wider ecosystems is largely unknown. A 2011 evaluation by the Food and Environment Research Agency (Fera), now called Fera Science, warned that manipulating the populations of carnivores like badgers could have “significant effects on the structure of ecological communities” and “wider knock‐on consequences for the ecology of other species and communities.”

Additionally, the main method of culling is so-called free/controlled shooting. In this method, badgers are shot at without being trapped first, which has been widely condemned as inhumane.

Considering all this, how can the mass slaughter of badgers be considered morally or environmentally acceptable? Especially in a country that is among the most nature-depleted on earth amid a global extinction crisis? Unfortunately, these are questions that the government's strategy does not appear to engage with.

Direct funds to real solutions

As the £1.4m funding figure for the vaccination study shows, this element of the government's bTB strategy will not come cheap. The Badger Trust has warned that badger vaccination would be "hugely expensive" to apply at scale.

The costs of badger blaming are already eye-wateringly high, with the £22 million of taxpayers' money used to facilitate the cull being just the tip of the iceberg. DEFRA also throws millions at cull policing costs each year. Moreover, the enduring focus on badgers inevitably delays finding a real solution to the issue of bTB in cows, which means public money is perpetually being thrown at the problem, such as to compensate farmers for the diseased cowsthey have to cull. In all, taxpayers fork out over £100m annually on this disease.

Protect the Wild believes that it is way past time for public money to be exclusively directed towards real solutions, such as stricter controls on cow movement, more accurate and regular testing, and investment in cow bTB vaccines.

The fact that the government is funding a pro-cull organisation that is skeptical about badger vaccination to run its vaccination study project illustrates the absurdity of continuing down the path of badger blaming. We call on policymakers to oppose any further badger culling and invest in real alternatives. If you feel the same way, please sign our petition to make your voice heard!

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