The badgers are around again in the south Dublin suburbs. The only harm they might do is the odd slight grubbing of the lawn, recognisable and understandable, in their search for worms. Rather shy animals and of quite astounding agility and speed when frightened. Has anyone ever worked out their m.p.h.? These thoughts come to mind just as a publication comes through the post. An Broc, Newsletter of Badger Watch Ireland. Much of its space is given to an account of the battle in England over the report of Prof. John Krebs of some 18 months ago which is interpreted as saying that while there is substantial circumstantial evidence for an association between TB infection in badgers and cattle, the evidence that badgers transmit TB to cattle in the natural situation is all indirect. Moreover, even though there is evidence that badgers are a cause of bovine TB outbreaks, evidence exists to show that badger culling is effective as an answer.
So they are now in the process in Britain of a five-year experiment with active culling, reactive culling (i.e. killing badgers only if they have access to farms where there have been TB outbreaks). The third category of experiment is of control areas where no culling will take place. Work on these lines began in later 1998. Our method of handling the suspected badgers is to snare them, a vicious form of killing; then shooting them. How effective are we at this? Well, in 1998 2,475 badgers were killed. It is estimated that there are some 200,000 in our territory. The procedure here is that the National Parks and Wildlife section of the Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands (what a mouthful) licenses the Department of Agriculture to snare these protected animals. By the way, deer are subject to TB. What do we do about them? In the meantime, you are free to make up your mind as to whether the infection starts with the cattle and the way they are looked after, or with the badger population. The bovine TB campaign had been going, surely, for decades before the badger came into the equation.
Anyway, there are no cattle within miles of the badgers mentioned above. And Sile de Valera, the Minister for Arts, Heritage etc told Trevor Sargent in a recent written reply to a Dail question that "this research programme also provides for development work on a vaccine for badgers which will, if successful, ultimately provide considerable dividends for the badger population in its own right, which is also subject to Tuberculosis."