Well the truth is starting to emerge about the Coalition’s unpopular attempt to address the incidence of TB in cattle.

As many as one in six badgers of the 1,861 badgers shot in the Gloucestershire and Somerset trial areas took longer than five minutes to die according to a report leaked to the media.

Oxford Mail:

Julia Hammett thinks the badger cull was inhumane

One of the approved methods estimating the delay was to time the duration of screams, a deeply inhumane way to establish humanness. According to the Coalition’s own rules, all badgers should have been killed rapidly. The free shooting method therefore has been shown to be totally unacceptable.

Monitoring of the cull was inadequate with only nine badgers being seen killed by controlled shooting.

Only 49 per cent of the estimated population in the cull area (3,800) were killed in the whole trials instead of the 70 per cent required for possible benefits.

So the two key conditions for the pilot culls that they should be humane and effective have not been met. Added to this, estimates that the cost of the cull has been £7m, £3.2m paid by the taxpayers and you have a disastrous policy.

In the face of all this, the powerful NFU lobby is calling for the Government to pay for even more culling.

Culling badgers has yet again been shown to be an unscientific and inhumane policy which will cost taxpayers a fortune, resulting in very little benefit over a 10-year period.

Culling should be abandoned immediately and all resources focused on improved cattle controls, expansion of badger vaccination programmes already underway throughout the country including Oxfordshire and most importantly, vaccination of the national herd against .

The Commons are debating the cull today. Please email your local MP and Owen Paterson, Environment Minister to ask them to stop the cull now.

JULIA HAMMETT

Oxfordshire Badger Group

Hurst Rise Road

Oxford