Maria Eagle MP, Labour’s Shadow Environment Secretary, responding to confirmation from the new Tory Environment Secretary, Liz Truss, that the Government will go ahead with badger culls this year without any independent scientific assessment, said:
“Today the new Environment Secretary flunked her first test since taking over from Owen Paterson by pledging to continue with the same discredited policy of badger culls.
“Liz Truss missed a clear opportunity to leave prejudice-based policy in the past and place science firmly at the centre of her department’s policy.
“Instead the Government’s ‘inhumane and ineffective’ badger culls will go ahead this year as planned without further independent scrutiny and will be assessed by Natural England, despite that body’s own chief scientific adviser describing them as an ‘epic failure’.”
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Editor’s Notes:
1. Professor David Macdonald described the Government’s badger culls as an ‘epic failure’
‘Following this epic failure it is hard to see how continuing this approach could be justified.’
http://ptes.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/SoBM-2014-low-res-for-web.pdf
2. Independent Expert Panel found that the two pilot badger culls in Somerset and Gloucestershire failed on both the effectiveness, humaneness tests-(April 2014)
- Humaneness- “It is extremely likely that between 7.4% and 22.8% of badgers that were shot at were still alive after 5 min, and therefore at risk of experiencing marked pain. We are concerned at the potential for suffering that these figures imply.”
- Effectiveness- “Controlled shooting in conjunction with cage trapping, over the 6-week period of the pilot culls, failed to remove at least 70% of the pre-cull badger population from either pilot area. It is extremely likely that combined shooting and cage trapping removed less than 48.1% of the badgers in Somerset and less than 39.1% of the badgers in Gloucestershire.”