New petition: 'End the Badger cull'
Protect the Wild asking government to adopt other approaches to bovine TB control
On Thursday 28th November, Protect the Wild made a fresh attack on Labour’s continuation of the ‘ineffective’ badger cull. We launched a new petition on the government petitions website, calling for an end to the badger cull and asking for the implementation of cattle focused measures to control bTB instead.
Why now and why this particular ask?
The background
Since it began as a ‘trial’ in 2013, badgers have been killed in huge numbers to protect the dairy industry from bovine TB – a disease of cattle. The government's kill strategy is a failure on many levels, and any attempt to prove that badger culling alone is responsible for reducing bTB incidents in cattle is misleading at best.
As many as 250,000 badgers have now been killed.
Culled badgers have been predominantly healthy.
Cattle-based measures implemented from 2010 (particularly the introduction of the annual tuberculin skin (SICCT) test) are responsible for the slowing, levelling, peaking and decrease in bovine TB in cattle during the study period.
The recently-elected Labour government agree that culling is an 'ineffective' way to control bTB, but refuses to cancel licences to kill even more badgers issued in mid-May 2024 by the previous government.
Tens of thousands more badgers are likely to die between now and 2029.
The badger cull is the government-sanctioned slaughter of a protected species and Protect the Wild is totally opposed to it. It must end.
The Labour Government
Ahead of winning July’s general election, the Labour Party wooed nature-loving voters by vowing to "end the ineffective badger cull" in its manifesto.
On 30 August, Defra announced “Government to end badger cull with new TB eradication strategy”. It was, they said, the “first Bovine TB strategy in a decade to end the badger cull and drive down TB rates to protect farmers' livelihood.”
The announcement made by Defra seemed interesting but it was typically vague and unclear. There was no definitive timeline, and nothing coming from the government itself that clearly said to us that no matter what future surveys find or what vaccination programmes prove or disprove, from now on badgers were safe.
In September 115,000 signatures collected over the previous year by Protect the Wild, Born Free, Badger Trust, and Avaaz and demanding an end to the cull were handed into Defra. No comment was made and still no further commitment was announced.
In November 2024, Protect the Wild’s Rob Pownall and Charlie Moores attended a seminar organised by the Oxfordshire Badger Group and presented by ecologist Tom Langton and Professor Paul Torgerson, co-authors of a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature magazine in July 2024.
That paper skewered statistical anomalies in the results of the Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT), the same trial that formed the basis of the current cull. The authors showed that culling was in fact not leading to reductions in bovine TB. The solution to stopping the spread of a cattle disease lay in cattle-based solutions, not in killing badgers.
All of us at the meeting promised to keep up the fight against the cull. For our part, we decided that we would continue creating animations and writing articles - and launch a new petition aimed at the government.
The Petition
Yes, of course, petitions take a huge amount of effort to reach the 100k signature threshold where they may then be debated by the government - even then there is no guarantee that the ‘ask’ will be acted upon.
But they are undoubtedly a rallying point.
They remind governments that we aren’t going to sit back and wait for them to ‘do something’.
And they are a way for thousands and thousands of us to have our voices heard.
A few weeks later the petition went live. The wording is simple and direct. The full text is below:
“End the Badger cull and adopt other approaches to bovine TB control
The Government’s TB Eradication Strategy allows the continued killing of badgers, a protected species, until the end of this Parliament, despite the Labour manifesto calling the cull “ineffective.”
We believe the badger cull is unjustified and must end.
Some research has suggested culling results in a reduction in bovine TB (bTB) in cattle. However, there are concerns about the methodology used. Other research, which has been peer reviewed and published, shows no evidence that culling badgers reduces confirmed bTB in cattle. Over 230,000 badgers — many healthy — have been killed, disrupting ecosystems without solid scientific justification.
We call for an immediate end to the cull and the implementation of cattle focused measures to control bTB, rather than what we see as scapegoating wildlife.”
Please sign - today!
While we certainly don’t have an issue with an insistence on accuracy and showing where our facts come from, it took a surprisingly long series of emails with the petitions’ team to reach a final version they would allow to be published. Whether or not this is because farming and the badger cull is such a sensitive issue - especially since the protests organised by some farmers over the recent changes to inheritance tax - we can’t know, but our first draft was - well, ‘different’.
Nevertheless, what got through emphasises that Labour has said the cull is ‘ineffective’ and it alludes to the fact that they are looking at implementing their new ‘eradication strategy’.
The difference is that we want the cull to end IMMEDIATELY and those measures to be brought in NOW - not kicked down the road while even more badgers die.
I have signed this - thank you for all that you are doing on it. I am personally disgusted that the new Labour government have not already stopped killing badgers as they promised. They won’t be getting my vote again, or possibly ever as things stand. I have been a life long Labour supporter.
Signed wishing you all the luck in the world and were gonna need it against lying labour and their lying manifesto 🤔