Brian May dressed in a badger suit, singing a specially-composed ‘badger song’? That’s what we were promised on Wednesday morning, but alas, the stunt never pulled through. We did, however, see a flashmob of fifty ‘dancing badgers’ outside Defra HQ, protesting about this summer’s planned badger cull.
So what, exactly, were they protesting about? Bovine Tuberculosis (bTB) is currently the greatest threat to British cattle farmers, as the number of affected cattle has risen drastically in the UK over the last 25 years. According to Defra:
‘The number of new cases has doubled every nine years. Last year TB led to the slaughter of 26,000 cattle in England at a cost of nearly £100 million. In the last ten years bovine TB has cost the taxpayer £500 million.’
So what can be done to prevent the spread of the disease? Anti-cull protesters claim that Owen Paterson’s planned badger cull – which will go ahead this summer as a pilot procedure in West Gloucestershire and West Somerset – will have only a small impact on the spread of the disease in cattle.
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