The licenses issued for authorised cull companies to kill between 25, and 41, additional badgers across more than 30 licenced zones in England. However, the claim in the report that culling will help lower the incidence of the disease in cattle, even in a modest way, is just plain wrong, given that six years into licenced badger culls, the Government has failed to provide a shred of evidence to demonstrate any impact whatsoever. Close to 4, badgers have been killed in the original two cull zones in Gloucestershire and Somerset since , yet data from these zones suggest that far from reducing infection in cattle, the infection remains just as prevalent as it was when culling started, and the number of new cases in cattle is actually rising.
However, the exclusion of this data increased the uncertainty in the model. The paper also reports the results from an earlier analysis by Jenkins et al. This can be viewed as another estimate of the overall contribution of badgers to cattle TB, as this is the level of reduction achieved if the badger-to-cattle route is reduced by culling the badger population. Firstly it is worth stressing that there is a large amount of uncertainty around the estimates produced, particularly the overall contribution of badgers as estimated by the model.
As stated above the data are specifically from the RBCT areas and different rates of transmission may occur in other areas. As such, the exact values quoted should be treated with a note of caution. Both the analyses support the conclusion that badgers play a major role in maintaining M. If accurate, these results suggest that reducing badger to cattle transmission at a proportion of farms could potentially lead to significant benefits in TB reduction.
Infected badgers rarely show signs of bTB, with a high proportion of infections resulting in a lengthy period of latency with few obvious lesions at post mortem examination.
As such infected and infectious badgers often live with the disease asymptomatically throughout their natural lives, and shed M. Transmission of M. Badgers often inhabit woodland close to pastureland which typically holds a larger number of earthworms , and while cattle generally avoid areas of grass soiled with badger faces and urine, some cattle will graze contaminated herbage, particularly when over-grazing occurs.
Furthermore, bTB infected badgers tend to range further than non-infected individuals, have larger home ranges and forage father away from the main sett, increasing the likelihood of encountering cattle. Already subscribed?
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