Badger vaccination

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Mungo

Mungo

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I’ll just leave this here for comment:

www.theguardian.com

Vaccinating badgers more effective than culls in stopping bovine TB, study finds

Percentage of badgers with bTB fell to zero in Cornish study, raising hopes of end to cull of 210,000 badgers since 2013
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

For the avoidance of doubt, I think there are very good reasons to shoot badgers that have nothing to do with TB. If anything, the arguments over how to deal with TB have polarised opinion so severely that rational discussion about the basic ecology of managing a meso predator has become impossible.
 
Welsh Government went for vaccination over culling of badgers- think there was an issue though in getting enough vaccines as they use the same human grade vaccine and it was being diverted else where .
 
Practical to vaccinate? Best they get on with the remaining 500,000+ animals

Vaccination was never in doubt as such, it is more how do you go about doing it en masse.

I too am pro badger control for various reasons but I am not necessarily in favour of formal government/defra led culls. They are a huge cost and all of this could be avoided if they just took them off ticket and allowed landowners to control them as they see fit. It would create pockets of badger free zones that could be managed each year by those with a vested interest in badger control and on the contrary, it would create other pockets of badger friendly zones where landowners are happy for them to be present. All without having to **** about with sticking in a needle in over half a million wild animals.
 
Big weasels. Bloody things should just be shot as required in whichever areas they're a cause for concern.
 
"The numbers of badgers vaccinated per square kilometre a year were higher than the numbers culled on nearby land, even though vaccination was conducted for only two nights per location while culling operations extended over at least six weeks.”
It would be nice if the Guardian article explained the factors that made this possible.
It seems to me that if you can get close enough to vaccinate, you can get close enough to euthanise. This simply suggests to me that the vaccinators and the cullers weren't given a level playing field.
I dimly remember the Guardian doing genuine journalism once, but they've taken on such an ideological bent that you now have to read everything they write with a depolarising filter, which tires the brain. They seem to think that the mere existence of the Telegraph and the Mail - who have even less idea what the word means- absolves them of responsibility for balance.
 
Mr. Gain said:
"The numbers of badgers vaccinated per square kilometre a year were higher than the numbers culled on nearby land, even though vaccination was conducted for only two nights per location while culling operations extended over at least six weeks.”
It would be nice if the Guardian article explained the factors that made this possible.
It seems to me that if you can get close enough to vaccinate, you can get close enough to euthanise. This simply suggests to me that the vaccinators and the cullers weren't given a level playing field.
I dimly remember the Guardian doing genuine journalism once, but they've taken on such an ideological bent that you now have to read everything they write with a depolarising filter, which tires the brain. They seem to think that the mere existence of the Telegraph and the Mail - who have even less idea what the word means- absolves them of responsibility for balance.
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To be fair, the bit about relative numbers was a quote from the research paper itself.

I will go look and see what information is in it.
 
I haven’t got an issue with vaccinating badgers, the last thing I want to see is badgers wiped out, but the fact is there are too many of them, and they are wiping out everything else in the area where I am, cull them sensibly like other species.

I have had several encounters where badgers have come up and touched me with their nose and that’s a clear sign they are too familiar with humans and there are too many of them that leads to regular encounters.

IMG_6967.webp

Regards,
Gixer
 
I agree with the sentiment laid out by mungo, I want them controlled for reasons other than TB.

They decimate everything in the area and cause havoc.
There’s no balance at all when badgers are In the area.

Scotland is overran with them in places yet we just have to sit and watch it happen.

I’d like to think one day they will allow us to control them but it’s too early to drink (also midweek) and fantasise about level headed governments.
 
When I was a kid growing up on the edge of the Chiltern Hills in Oxfordshire there were very few badgers, buzzards, no red kites or deer.

Nowadays there lots of all of them. In some places there are too many.

But in the UK once something is protected it seems to be protected for ever.

We need a way to live alongside nature and where necessary control numbers of certain species.

We don’t to kill all the badgers, buzzards or deer. We need a balance.

TB is a very nasty disease. At one stage it was probably one of the biggest causes of death in the UK. But in previous generations testing and post mortem was not as good as it is these days. TB tests are still not perfect. Many many died of consumption, and one of the biggest carriers was unpasteurised milk from cows being freely given at schools to children. When compulsory pasteurisation came in down went TB.

In the UK, TB came under control through vaccination, so much so that TB was for time considered a minor disease. It is now on the rise again as many no longer are vaccinated.

Innoculating badgers seems like a lot of hard work. Surely innoculating cattle, especially the breeding / milking herd seems like a much better option??
 
Heym SR20 said:
When I was a kid growing up on the edge of the Chiltern Hills in Oxfordshire there were very few badgers, buzzards, no red kites or deer.

Nowadays there lots of all of them. In some places there are too many.

But in the UK once something is protected it seems to be protected for ever.

We need a way to live alongside nature and where necessary control numbers of certain species.

We don’t to kill all the badgers, buzzards or deer. We need a balance.

TB is a very nasty disease. At one stage it was probably one of the biggest causes of death in the UK. But in previous generations testing and post mortem was not as good as it is these days. TB tests are still not perfect. Many many died of consumption, and one of the biggest carriers was unpasteurised milk from cows being freely given at schools to children. When compulsory pasteurisation came in down went TB.

In the UK, TB came under control through vaccination, so much so that TB was for time considered a minor disease. It is now on the rise again as many no longer are vaccinated.

Innoculating badgers seems like a lot of hard work. Surely innoculating cattle, especially the breeding / milking herd seems like a much better option??
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Agree with you on all counts. Vaccination of badgers is ridiculously labour intensive and - unless you tag them as you jab them - risks jabbing the same one repeatedly.
The badger cull in our area has partially redressed the balance of wild life species for the better.
 
I think vaccination is a good idea. But it's a near impossible task to vaccinate all of them. If it were that easy to trap and vaccinate all the badgers, then we would have killed all the badgers in our area in year one of the cull. You will also catch the same badger 5-6 times in a week as they'll soon learn it's an easy meal and no harm is done.
The only thing we can vaccinate is cattle as we have control of them. But as yet the testing isn't there to differentiate between vaccinated cattle and TB carriers.
We've redressed the balance here and since the numbers of badgers have gone down so much more wildlife has flourished.
 
An interesting observation.

I grew up in the county of Angus.
Learning to drive in the early/mid 80s there wasn’t a road where which was free from bunny roadkill - but no badgers.

Driving those same roads now, there are no bunnies on the road but every 3rd road has a splattered badger.

Don’t tell me there hasn’t been an increase in the badger population.
 
devon deer stalker said:
Too be honest @Mungo I believe the only way forward is to remove the current protection on Badgers and leave if to us, just like deer, over population and you get more tb out there.
A smaller well controlled population is what is required.
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With respect, the "leave it to us" approach doesn't seem to be having much impact on the deer overpopulation situation, does it?
 
VSS said:
With respect, the "leave it to us" approach doesn't seem to be having much impact on the deer overpopulation situation, does it?
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A lot of this is down to the chaps who pay over the odds to shoot two or three deer a year on a good sized bit of land....

Anyway, back on topic....

The best course of action to reduce the spread of bTb would be to vaccinante cattle on the day they're born. But thanks to the ancient "scratch test" this brings them up as a positive result. Surely in this day and age a record could be made on the animal's passport to indicate the fact that it has been vaccinated.

Fully support the cull, was out last night looking for a fox or two. Didnt see a single one. Saw plenty of badgers. This is in a cull zone!
 
VSS said:
With respect, the "leave it to us" approach doesn't seem to be having much impact on the deer overpopulation situation, does it?
Click to expand...
Badgers live in one place, it's easy to sit where they live, they also mostly nocturnal so can't see you that well in the dark especially if your down wind.
 
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