In Welsh they are known as "moch daear" - earth pigs.
badger cull
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In Welsh they are known as "moch daear" - earth pigs.
limulus
Well-Known Member
Striped pigs we can em.
I dont envy anyone getting involved with this what with peta and lacs lurking around every corner getting your vehicle registration then paying a visit. Why badgers set the emotions of these people off more readily than deer control is beyond me but then I suppose these anti types are just wired that way.
I dont envy anyone getting involved with this what with peta and lacs lurking around every corner getting your vehicle registration then paying a visit. Why badgers set the emotions of these people off more readily than deer control is beyond me but then I suppose these anti types are just wired that way.
nell
Well-Known Member
Matt, im pretty sure bagers where given the protection they enjoy was to stop them being baited (and rightly so) nothing more, there numbers in my area far out wheigh that of the fox,they also do a lot of damage that foxes are blaimed for....
As far as eating them, lets not forget they are just big stoats
stalkinginengland
Well-Known Member
In hunting areas and by hunt servants they are known as pigs.
bambislayer
Well-Known Member
Yes and current fines are around £250 a tin!
PETA & LACS don't need to be out and about in the countryside, when c*** like this is being posted on open forums!
I haven't posted for a while, looking at this thread, reminds me why!
old man
Well-Known Member
To round this off then, do we think that too many stripeys are a bad idea?
The same should go for everything, a balance being the way forward.
bambislayer, FWIW, I agree with your sentiment about open forums.
If you look away from your quarry when out with a rifle you might be amazed who is watching you through binos, a sobering thought.
The same should go for everything, a balance being the way forward.
bambislayer, FWIW, I agree with your sentiment about open forums.
If you look away from your quarry when out with a rifle you might be amazed who is watching you through binos, a sobering thought.
The Facts.
1 Farmers get very litle compensation for what could be a very valuble animal. Taking into accout blood lines take years to achive, rare breeds, a life times work.
2 In 1986 there was 235 cattle tested positive for TB in 2010 there was 28,541 cattle tested positive for TB
3 Defra spent £90m 2010/11 on TB control in England
4 It cost taxpayers in England £500m over the last ten years.
5 Without taking action it will cost tax payers £1bn over the next decade
So yes I do think there should be a legal cull by approved marksmen.
1 Farmers get very litle compensation for what could be a very valuble animal. Taking into accout blood lines take years to achive, rare breeds, a life times work.
2 In 1986 there was 235 cattle tested positive for TB in 2010 there was 28,541 cattle tested positive for TB
3 Defra spent £90m 2010/11 on TB control in England
4 It cost taxpayers in England £500m over the last ten years.
5 Without taking action it will cost tax payers £1bn over the next decade
So yes I do think there should be a legal cull by approved marksmen.
I guess they dont want to gas them so they can get an accurate number of badgers killed. Gassing them would create a lot more work in retrieving the carcases.
Any legal cull of Badgers should be accompanied by carcase retrieval & tagging , along with some of those vast sums spent on compo, being directed into post mortem testing for the disease, thereby giving everyone a definitive picture on what is carrying what,...... anyone with an open ticket with minimum Level one, should be considered qualified to shoot Brock where required, with at least a 60 grain round, I probably shoot many, many more rounds after last light, than in any other situation, so Brock is just another species to me, I would qualify my post of 60 grains being an optimum, as they are a really tough animal... I clouted one once with the towbar on my van, @ sixty miles an hour, it shook itself down & carried on it's way.
Sinistral
Well-Known Member
Not my work, but a good summary ...........
Squabbles between farmers andanimal rights' protesters bore me senseless. This week, environment secretaryCaroline Spelman announced that the scientific evidence supports her new policy of farmers killing badgers to prevent bovine TB.It's an overstatement, but more importantly, this story walks through several important issues in science.
Firstly, what works in principle may not work in practice. Bovine TB is a massive problem (and one reason why wepasteurise milk). Around 25,000cattle were slaughtered last year because of it, and the cost to the taxpayer, since we compensate farmers, was £90m.Badgers carry TB, and about half of all cattle infections come from a badger source. It makes perfect sense that killing some badgers should reduce the number of cattle infections.
To test this hunch, 10 years ago the government took a very unusual step, and set up a proper trial: the Randomised Badger Culling Trial. This was a huge project, running from 1998 to 2007, in 30 separate 100km2 areas around England.
These study zones were grouped together into triplets. One zone in a triplet got repeated culling, roughly once a year ("proactive culling"). Another saw local badger culling after any TB outbreak in cattle ("reactive culling"). And a final zone was kept as a "control" region, with no culling. TB rates were surveyed in all of the areas.
You'd have thought this culling should do some good, or at least no harm. In fact, the "reactiveculling" was stopped after a few years when the rates of cattle TB infections in these areas turned out to be higher than areas with no culling, by about 20%.
One suggested explanation was"perturbation". Badgers live in small groups, with territorial boundaries; if you kill some, the groups are disrupted, and the animals wander further afield, spreading infections more widely. But the results from the"proactive culling" were more interesting. In the 100km2 culling zone,cattle TB infections fell by about a quarter. But in the 2km-wide"ring" around the proactive culling zone, the number of TB infections in cattle rose by about a quarter, perhaps, again, because of"perturbation".
A 2km ring becomes less important when the culling area is larger, and mathematical modelling suggests that after150km2, the extra TB infections in the ring are outweighed by thebenefits in the cull zone. At this size, you prevent 23 of the 187 expectedherd outbreaks, and so save £600,000 ( outbreaks each cost £27,000). The cost,however, using the cage-trapping method used in the trial, is £2.14m. This is why people concluded it wasn't worth the effort.
Here is the second science bit.The government is now introducing a kind of farmer-led culling. This costs around £500,000 for the same size area, and so now a cull becomes cost-effective, by a hair. But we also end up several steps away from the scientific evidence. First, we're assuming that results from small cull zones scale up neatly into larger ones, and that killing can be done uniformly without local perturbation.
But more importantly, the trial loses what evidence nerds call "external validity": the ideal perfect intervention, used in the trial, is very different to the boring, cheap, real-world intervention that the trial is being used to justify.
This is a common problem, and the right thing to do next is a new trial, this time in the real world, with no magic. The intervention could be the thing we're doing, and the outcome could be routinely collected bovine TB data, since that's the outcome we're interested in. This gives you answers that matter, on the results you care about, with the intervention you're going to use.
People worry that research is expensive, and deprives participants of effective interventions. That's not the case when your intervention and data collection are happening anyway, and when you don't know if your intervention actually works. Here, though, as in many cases, the missing ingredient is will.
Squabbles between farmers andanimal rights' protesters bore me senseless. This week, environment secretaryCaroline Spelman announced that the scientific evidence supports her new policy of farmers killing badgers to prevent bovine TB.It's an overstatement, but more importantly, this story walks through several important issues in science.
Firstly, what works in principle may not work in practice. Bovine TB is a massive problem (and one reason why wepasteurise milk). Around 25,000cattle were slaughtered last year because of it, and the cost to the taxpayer, since we compensate farmers, was £90m.Badgers carry TB, and about half of all cattle infections come from a badger source. It makes perfect sense that killing some badgers should reduce the number of cattle infections.
To test this hunch, 10 years ago the government took a very unusual step, and set up a proper trial: the Randomised Badger Culling Trial. This was a huge project, running from 1998 to 2007, in 30 separate 100km2 areas around England.
These study zones were grouped together into triplets. One zone in a triplet got repeated culling, roughly once a year ("proactive culling"). Another saw local badger culling after any TB outbreak in cattle ("reactive culling"). And a final zone was kept as a "control" region, with no culling. TB rates were surveyed in all of the areas.
You'd have thought this culling should do some good, or at least no harm. In fact, the "reactiveculling" was stopped after a few years when the rates of cattle TB infections in these areas turned out to be higher than areas with no culling, by about 20%.
One suggested explanation was"perturbation". Badgers live in small groups, with territorial boundaries; if you kill some, the groups are disrupted, and the animals wander further afield, spreading infections more widely. But the results from the"proactive culling" were more interesting. In the 100km2 culling zone,cattle TB infections fell by about a quarter. But in the 2km-wide"ring" around the proactive culling zone, the number of TB infections in cattle rose by about a quarter, perhaps, again, because of"perturbation".
A 2km ring becomes less important when the culling area is larger, and mathematical modelling suggests that after150km2, the extra TB infections in the ring are outweighed by thebenefits in the cull zone. At this size, you prevent 23 of the 187 expectedherd outbreaks, and so save £600,000 ( outbreaks each cost £27,000). The cost,however, using the cage-trapping method used in the trial, is £2.14m. This is why people concluded it wasn't worth the effort.
Here is the second science bit.The government is now introducing a kind of farmer-led culling. This costs around £500,000 for the same size area, and so now a cull becomes cost-effective, by a hair. But we also end up several steps away from the scientific evidence. First, we're assuming that results from small cull zones scale up neatly into larger ones, and that killing can be done uniformly without local perturbation.
But more importantly, the trial loses what evidence nerds call "external validity": the ideal perfect intervention, used in the trial, is very different to the boring, cheap, real-world intervention that the trial is being used to justify.
This is a common problem, and the right thing to do next is a new trial, this time in the real world, with no magic. The intervention could be the thing we're doing, and the outcome could be routinely collected bovine TB data, since that's the outcome we're interested in. This gives you answers that matter, on the results you care about, with the intervention you're going to use.
People worry that research is expensive, and deprives participants of effective interventions. That's not the case when your intervention and data collection are happening anyway, and when you don't know if your intervention actually works. Here, though, as in many cases, the missing ingredient is will.
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Just an observation here, "perturbation"........................... you kill a few, & the rest decide to vacate????, dissipate,????.................. what happens when a Badger sett is depopulated by a massive kill count over a few weeks when the young, along with a few of the adults are squashed by traffic on the nearby roads?.... do you quantify this as "Perturbation" also?
The Firearms Guidance to the police covers badgers, and seem to think they are a little more 'killable'
Badgers
14.21 The Protection of Badgers Act 1992
makes it a criminal offence to kill or injure
badgers except in limited circumstances
(for example, as a mercy killing, as an
incidental result of a lawful action or under
a licence issued by DEFRA). If badgers are
to be shot, this must be done with a
smooth-bore weapon of not less than 20
bore or a rifle using ammunition having a
muzzle energy of at least 160 foot pounds
and a bullet weighing not less than 38 grains.
As a mercy killing maybe,..... at 200yds I reckon to go with a bit more OOOMPHT.
These study zones were grouped together into triplets. One zone in a triplet got repeated culling, roughly once a year ("proactive culling"). Another saw local badger culling after any TB outbreak in cattle ("reactive culling"). And a final zone was kept as a "control" region, with no culling. TB rates were surveyed in all of the areas.
You'd have thought this culling should do some good, or at least no harm. In fact, the "reactiveculling" was stopped after a few years when the rates of cattle TB infections in these areas turned out to be higher than areas with no culling, by about 20%.
I have heard that one of the reasons that this study didn't work was that the farmers in the no culling areas were so p***ed of with not being allowed cull while others were that they killed badgers on the quiet, and this is the reason why the no cull areas appeared to have had a lower bTB incidence.
You'd have thought this culling should do some good, or at least no harm. In fact, the "reactiveculling" was stopped after a few years when the rates of cattle TB infections in these areas turned out to be higher than areas with no culling, by about 20%.
I have heard that one of the reasons that this study didn't work was that the farmers in the no culling areas were so p***ed of with not being allowed cull while others were that they killed badgers on the quiet, and this is the reason why the no cull areas appeared to have had a lower bTB incidence.
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