The Badger Trust, which is campaigning against the government's badger cull, has written to environment secretary Liz Truss to air concerns over claims made by an anonymous whistle-blower over the weekend.

Culling could resume in two 'pilot' areas of the South-West within weeks, though the Trust and Defra are engaged in a High Court legal challenge over the government's plans to abandon independent monitoring of culling activities. The judicial review will resume later this month.

Defra insists that monitoring by AHVLA and cull licensing body will make up for the lack of independent oversight.

The whistle-blower, said to have worked as an AHVLA cull monitor during the 2013 pilot culls, spoke to the Sunday Times about the "utter chaos" witnessed in cull zones last year. The anonymous monitor alleged that contractors had been forced to stop firing near protestors and members of the public, armed police had surrounded a field after a protestor grabbed a loaded gun which had been left in a contractor's car and another contractor had falsified their samples in order to tryst in a hotel paid for as part of the multi-million pound operation, which independent experts deemed to have failed on the grounds of effectiveness and humanness.

In the letter sent on Tuesday, Badger Trust CEO Dominic Dyer said the allegations raise "serious concerns about the behaviour of both badger cullers and AHVLA contractors, which call into question the safety of the cull as well as the monitoring of its effectiveness." 

Dyer claimed that the AHVLA monitor had passed on a report detailing the alleged breaches in January 2014. He demanded to know what steps Defra took at the time to investigate the claims made and whether the Independent Expert Panel was made aware of them.

The Trust is seeking a meeting with the Defra secretary, who was appointed last month, to discuss the cull and the alleged safety breaches and falsification of samples.

Defra maintains that culling is necessary as part of "a raft of measures" to tackle bovine TB. Though the environment department maintains that their cull has the support of "leading vets" and that bTB has never been successfully tackled without killing wildlife that form and environmental 'reservoir' of disease, cull opponents contest these claims and warn that an increasing body of evidence shows culling to be redundant at best.