Tell the Welsh Government - NO badger cull!

Cymru doesn't need to kill badgers, and the evidence proves it

This week the Senedd voted to urge the Welsh government to consider a badger cull to tackle bovine TB. The motion, tabled by Reform UK and backed by 79 votes to 9, is not binding. But it should worry anyone who cares about wildlife, scientific evidence, or public money.

Before Wales even thinks about killing badgers, it should look hard at what happened in England, and at what Wales itself has already achieved.

In England, between 2013 and 2025, culling killed roughly a quarter of a million badgers. That’s more than half of the country’s estimated population. It was the largest destruction of a protected species in living memory, and in some areas, badgers were driven towards local extinctions. After all that killing, the Labour government that inherited the policy described the cull as “ineffective” and moved to end it in favour of vaccination.

Wales, on the other hand, scrapped culling in 2012 and focused instead on the actual driver of the disease: industrial farming. It focused on better and more frequent testing, tighter cow-movement controls, and improved biosecurity.

New herd incidents in Wales have more than halved. Today almost 95% of Welsh herds are officially TB-free, and the disease is at close to its lowest level in two decades, all achieved without a single badger being culled.

Ministers say they will wait for the TB Technical Advisory Group’s report before deciding anything. But it’s extremely troubling that the Senedd vote (supported by Plaid Cymru and the Conservatives, but opposed by Labour and the Greens) is favouring mass-killing. Unlike in England, ministers should not cherry-pick scientific evidence to fit a predetermined answer.

Polling shows that people of Wales oppose culling badgers. So they deserve a say. The minimum we should demand is that there should be a full public consultation.

Wales is winning this fight the humane way. Let’s not throw that away.