Animal welfare campaigners, angered by the government's cull policy, which they claim goes against the public will and flies in the face of scientific evidence, have reacted strongly to suggestions that Defra could reintroduce gassing badgers if its 'free-shooting' methodology fails to deliver.

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Data from the Somerset cull zone published on Wednesday (9th October) revealed that, despite significant reductions in the official badger population estimates, markspeople have failed to meet their targets of killing 70 percent of badgers. With only 59 percent of the reduced population estimate accounted for, the Somerset cull company has applied to Natural England for an extension of two to three weeks. The cull company orchestrating the Gloucestershire trial cull is understood to have followed suit.

Responding to criticism on Wednesday, Defra Secretary Owen Paterson said, "I am not moving the goalposts. The badgers have moved the goalposts." He told the BBC, "We're dealing with a wild animal, subject to the vagaries of the weather and disease and breeding patterns."

The Environment Secretary, who insists culling badgers is necessary to address the 'wildlife reservoir' of bTB in England, maintained that, "Current indications suggest that the pilot has been safe, humane and effective in delivering a reduction in the badger population of just under 60 per cent."

However, farmer and conservative MP Neil Parish, who chaired All-Party Parliamentary Groups on various types of livestock farming last year, admitted to the BBC that the trials had "not worked as hoped" and added "there is quite a problem with the numbers".

On Monday, cull opponents at Humane Society International UK, expressed "extreme concern" at the possibility that Defra consider reintroducing gassing as a means of disposing of badgers if free shooting is deemed 'unsuccessful' by the independent panel tasked with evaluating the pilots.

HSI spokesperson Wendy Higgins slammed Defra over the department's repeated refusal to discuss the criteria on which it will be judging the culls as safe, effective and humane. She pointed to Defra's Draft Strategy, released in July 2013, which suggested that the department could adopt alternative means of culling, including gassing badgers – which was deemed inhumane and outlawed in the 1980s.

A Defra spokesperson acknowledged on Wednesday that the department had commissioned "desk-based research," reviewing available written information on gassing, but added that, as the method was found to be inhumane, use of gas such as carbon monoxide to kill badgers is "years away" from being approved. Instead, if free-shooting is deemed to have been ineffective, caged-shooting, which was used during the ten year RBCT trials, is more likely be introduced at a much greater cost to the famer-run cull companies.  

Wendy Higgins continued, "Death by gassing can cause considerable animal suffering and if DEFRA resorts to this it will be a shocking new moral low in the Government's disastrous badger cull policy. Badger setts are very complex in structure, making it extremely difficult to achieve lethal gas concentrations sufficient to kill all the animals inside, or indeed kill them quickly. Many badgers could die a long, lingering and extremely unpleasant death and any cubs could be orphaned and left to starve because typically they are less susceptible to the gas."

Responding to Owen Paterson's statement on the Somerset cull, she added on Wednesday, "It is suspiciously convenient that, as DEFRA Ministers were staring down the barrel of an unmitigated disaster, the badger kill targets have been halved and the government will declare the cull a success when everyone knows it's been an utter shambles. Either that or DEFRA has been dangerously incompetent and shown itself incapable of even counting badgers."