The Badger Trust's legal challenge against Defra's governance of two badger culls, which entered their second year a month ago, will be heard by the Court of Appeal on Thursday (9th October).

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The Trust maintains that Defra has a duty to appoint independent monitors to assess its 'pilot' badger culls in South West England, which the Conservative-led government has said it will roll out to new areas if it is re-elected next year. The Independent Expert Panel which oversaw the first year of culling in Somerset and Gloucestershire judged that the policy had been inhumane and ineffective.

Anti-cull campaigners argue that rolling out culls of badgers would be illegal and scientifically unjustifiable without independent oversight, which they claim was promised by Defra secretary Liz Truss' predecessors. However, the environment department maintains that monitoring by cull licensing body Natural England and AHVLA will constitute independent opinion.

The Trust was granted a High Court hearing before the culls resumed in the South West in September, but after the case was passed on, the Administrative Court ruled that the Secretary of State's decision to continue the culls without independent oversight was lawful, and that any assurances that badger culling policy would be independently monitored were not legally binding.   

In a hearing on 11th September, the Trust was granted permission to pursue its case in the Court of Appeal, after it was agreed that campaigners had a real prospect of success in their appeal.

In the early days of the policy, Defra officials repeatedly claimed that badger culls, which form part of the government's bovine TB eradication strategy, were to be "science-led." However, independent scientists including former government chief scientist and Royal Society president Lord Robert May have stated, "The government's policy does not make sense… They are transmuting evidence-based policy into policy-based evidence."

Professor Tim Coulson, a member of the IEP in 2013, said on Monday, "The Independent Expert Panel's report states clearly the rationale for ensuring that independent monitoring and the use of the statistically robust sample sizes and analytical methods, as used in the 2013 culls, are followed in further culling exercises.

"If this scientific advice is ignored then the data collected during the 2014 culls will be insufficiently reliable for assessment of humaneness and effectiveness. This means that farmers, veterinarians and scientists intimately involved in controlling bovine TB will be denied the information necessary to allow them to assess whether the IEP's recommended changes to the culling process have corrected the failings identified by the pilot culls."