The UK Government is due to make an announcement of new areas for badger culling this September.
There is great concern that Warwickshire will be among those counties where shooting of badgers will be allowed in an attempt to control the spread of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in cattle.
We are very conscious of the hardship bTB causes in the farming community and the need to find the right mechanisms to control the disease. But culling badgers will not stop the spread of bTB. Instead, time and public money will be wasted and thousands of wild animals needlessly slaughtered.
Warwickshire has been identified as an ‘Edge Area’ for bovine TB. This is the buffer zone between the High Risk Area (HRA) and Low Risk Area (LRA) which contains local disease fronts advancing from the HRA towards the LRA. The incidence of bovine TB in the majority of the Edge Area is much lower than in the HRA and we urge the Government to invest in supporting farmers to implement further bio-security measures to reduce the likelihood of cattle-to-cattle transmission. If the government decides to prioritise culling of badgers in Warwickshire it may be at the expense of further bio-security measures and actually make the problem in our area worse. This is because infected badgers may move in from HRA to replace those culled in Warwickshire as badgers are territorial.
This means we only have days to change the Government’s mind, so we need your support.
It is vital that we make sure that the badger cull is not extended into Warwickshire.
If we don’t manage to change the Government’s mind over the next few day’s then we’ll see the death of thousands of Warwickshire’s badgers. We will have failed to save them.
Stop the badger cull coming to Warwickshire Take action now!
Read our open letter to the farmers of Warwickshire
