Badger: Frederic Desmette; Packham: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/AlamyWhether badgers
are wounded or
killed outright is not
completely in the
gift of the shooter.
C
ampaigners have long sought
to stop badger culling. First,
they argued it wasn’t worth either
the financial cost or the lives of the
badgers themselves, because of
the minimal reductions in levels of
bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in cattle.
Then, they challenged the
Government’s failure to consider
the impact of culling on other
species – when licensing a cull
in an area used by protected birds
of prey, for example, they said
Natural England should have
assessed its impact on those
birds (BBC Wildlife, July 2018).
Though this challenge was
rejected by the High Court,
Natural England was found to have
breached European legislation (BBC
Wildlife, December 2018).
There was widespread
celebrationearlierthisyear
when theDepartmentfor
Environment,Food& Rural
Affairs(Defra)announced
it wasphasingout
cullinginfavour
of vaccination,
but tensofthousands of badgers will still
be killed over the next decade
(BBC Wildlife, Spring 2020).
Now, Wild Justice, the group
launched in February 2019 by
wildlife TV presenter Chris
Packham and conservationists Ruth
Tingay and Mark Avery, claims that
culling is cruel and wants to take
Natural England to court.
“The basis of our claim is that
Natural England has an obligation
to deliver a humane way of culling
badgers, and they commissioned an
expert study in 2013 about what that
would mean,” says Avery.
According to Avery, the panel
concluded that 95 per cent of badgers
shot in a free-running situation
ought to die within five minutes,
meaning only 5 per cent (or less)
can take longer than that.
Somebadgers are hit and run
away,sonobody knows how
longtheytake to die, but the
assumptionis that it’s more
thanfiveminutes.
Natural England doesn’t
sayhow many badgers
take more than fiveminutes to die, but an annual report
reveals what the non-recovery rate
is. In 2019, it was 11.4 per cent,
“similar to that observed during the
operations in the last seven years.”
“We say that’s not good enough,”
says Avery.
Defra says the likelihood of
badgers suffering is comparable
to other control activities such as
deer shooting.
And according to Natural
England’s latest report, whether
badgers are wounded or killed
outright is not completely in the
gift of the shooter. “Wounding can
result for a number of reasons, with
movement of the target species
simultaneously with trigger release
being the most common,” it says.
Wild Justice is waiting to hear
whether its challenge will be heard
in a Judicial Review – if it is, it will
ask the court to quash the culling
licencesanddeclarethemunlawful.
JamesFairFIND OUT MORE
Natural England’s badger culling
report 2019: bit.ly/2DjkstbBadgers can be found
inhabiting the same
areas as livestock.
Below: Chris Packham
and group Wild Justice
oppose the badger cull.