George Eustice, Farming Minister, responded to accusations that pilots of Defra’s badger cull have been a ‘disaster’ and ‘should be abandoned’ in a Commons debate yesterday.

Mr Eustice hit out at critics and accused the most prominent opponent of the policy, ecologist Professor Rosie Woodroff, former member of the Independent Scientific Group on bovine TB,  of a ‘somewhat unscientific outburst’ over the scientific basis of the pilot culls.

Professor Woodroffe was quoted dismissing the methodology and said the lack of data would make it ‘impossible to know how effective this year’s culls have been’.

Mr Eustice said Prof. Woodroffe should compare the Government’s methodology with that deployed in the ISG’s 10-year Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT).

“The reality is that there was no hair-trapping at all in the RBCTs, on which all our assumptions in the fight against this disease are based,” he said.

“In fact, no assessment of the badger population was made at the start of the culls. Instead, once four years of culling were finished, there was a retrospective attempt to estimate what the population might have been at the start—to back-calculate what the populations were.

“People have talked about the methodology that we adopted being crude, but how is that for crude? The RBCTs did not even assess the population before they started, and then they retrospectively tried to estimate what the population was.”

He continued, “There were sett surveys and sett sticking. We looked at the trees and measured actual activity in badger setts. That is a kind of reality check, to check whether our data models are giving the right information,” he said.