The Badger Trust has today lodged a claim in the High Court in a bid to prevent Defra carrying out its proposed pilot badger culls, which are set to go ahead in the autumn after the Olympics. The Trust’s announcement comes after it wrote to Defra outlining its intentions at the beginning of the month.

The trial culls, which have been proposed to test the efficacy and humaneness of ‘free-shooting’ badgers as a means of controlling the spread of bovine TB, are scheduled to take place in the autumn as the unpopularity of the policy led home secretary Theresa May and senior police officers to warn that police resources would be overstretched if forces had to monitor the Olympics and anti-cull protests simultaneously.

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In 2010, the trust managed to derail a proposed badger cull in Wales, which a court ruled would not have a marked enough effect on bTB breakdowns to merit killing a protected species. The trust maintains that Defra’s methodology for evaluating results of its proposed trials in England is defective. It claims that the proposals will not work and that the badger has been allowed to become a scapegoat in the place of more effective rigorous cattle-to-cattle controls.

Defra maintains that the cull is one of a range of methods it will adopt to combat bovine TB, however, upon assuming power, the current government put an end to a number of vaccination trials.

Pat Hayden, vice chairman of Badger Trust said, “Despite opposition from the majority of the public who responded to the Government’s consultations and stark warnings from many eminent independent scientists, it is astonishing that DEFRA has given the green light to a badger cull. Badger Trust will exhaust all peaceful, legal avenues of challenge to prevent this wrong-headed cull from going ahead.”

The Badger Trust said today that it will ask the High Court to overturn DEFRA’s decision on the basis of three grounds:

1. Efficacy: Defra has authorised Natural England to issue licences to reduce the rate of new incidences of bovine TB (although Defra statistics show that nine years of killing will, if successful, result in a 12-16 per cent reduction in bTB incidences), however, the trust contends that ‘reducing incidence’ is not the purpose for which the legal power was granted. It suggests licenses can only be issued to “prevent the spread of disease,” which it maintains the cull proposals will not do.

2. Cost assessment: The cost impact assessment underpinning DEFRA’s decision is flawed, as its cost assumptions are based on the farmer free-shooting option (this is estimated to be approximately ten times cheaper than cage-trapping badgers before killing them). However, after the first year of piloting the cull plans, the free-shooting method may be ruled out for being inhumane, ineffective or unsafe to the public. In that case, farmers will find themselves legally obliged to continue the cull on the much more costly “trap and shoot” basis until the end of the 4-year licence. The trust claims this “This is a significant cost risk for farmers, yet it is not properly reflected in the cost impact assessment which underpinned DEFRA’s decision, [particularly] given the poor cost-benefit prognosis for the cull.”

3. Natrual England remit: The trust also maintains that licensing badger killing is not within the remit of Natural England, the agency Defra has tasked with issuing permits. Natural England itself gave a highly critical response to the consultation on the cull proposals last year. The trust said in a stamen, “Even though DEFRA is making Natural England responsible for the licensing arrangements, under section 10(2)(a) of the Protection of Badgers Act 1992, culling badgers ‘for the prevention of spread of disease’ remains the Secretary of State’s own function. Thus, she had no legal power to issue section 15 guidance to Natural England in these circumstances.”

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