Hollywood Meets the Countryside

Did you know that Quentin Tarantino and James Cameron are bringing Kenneth Grahame’s wonderful, if a bit naïve and idyllic, allegory of the class system in Edwardian Britain up-to-date with a ‘bang’?

A Dark Twist on a Classic

In Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, one of the main characters – Mr Badger – is a bit of a gruff loner who apparently, ‘simply hates society’. The new reboot will blow his mind, quite literally, as Mr Badger gets his brains blown all over the woods.

Rather than being guilty of just possessing poor people skills, in the rewrite, he’s now an evil maniac intent on spreading biological mayhem everywhere he wanders by infecting every poor cow he sees with bTB.

Enter the Terminator… in Wellies

A scourge of insane farmers across the land, Mr Badger is ruthlessly and relentlessly hunted by a robotic assassin made from old tractor parts. The leather and shades have been replaced with sinister waxed cotton and green wellies.

Rather than uttering ‘hasta la vista’ and “I’ll be back” in those clipped European tones, our terminating yokel now says, ‘Get off my land’ and ‘Badgers spread Bovine Tuberculosis’.

What a Load of Bullocks

There is no compelling evidence that culling badgers will ever slow the spread of bTB, but that isn’t stopping a rural blood-fest Tarantino would be proud of.

The Official Line vs. The Reality

No matter how many times the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) says the cull is necessary and, carried out in the right way, can make a meaningful contribution to controlling bTB – all I hear is the noise of the National Farmers Union (NFU), grabbing them by the…

Despite whatever either side of the debate may say, and after years of research, the exact mechanism of how bTB is spread is not fully understood. However, if I had to wager who made the most sense, my money is with the Badger Trust.

The Real Cause of bTB

They explain that cattle mainly catch bTB from other cattle – it’s caught by breathing in bacilli expelled by infected animals as tiny aerosol droplets. It may also be caught through contamination of feeding and watering sites and from infected wildlife, including badgers and deer. But for some reason, Bambi has not made it into the firing line…

The Cull Makes Things Worse

The Badger Trust highlights the absurdity of the cull – most of the animals that will be murdered by government-approved marksmen won’t have bTB. Even in bTB hotspots, less than one in seven badgers are infected, and that means most animals killed in this totally random way will be perfectly healthy and of no danger to cattle at all.

In the short term, this will actually spread bTB as badgers disrupted by the shooting move to pastures new. So if Defra and the NFU really wanted to make progress in halting the spread, they should be lobbying the EU to allow the use of the only ‘Silver Bullet’ that will work – vaccination of both cattle and badgers.

A Campaign Worth Supporting

The cull is despicable, so until someone comes along and proves me wrong, let’s hope the anti-cull activists are successful with their campaign.