Natural England has issued the first cull license, less than a week after a challenge against cull proposals was defeated in the Court of Appeal. The first license has been issued for a culling company registered in Gloucestershire.

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Further details of the cull, including timings, have yet to be finalised.  

The two trial culls will be conducted by companies of farmers licensed to kill free-running badgers. Conservation, animal welfare and wildlife groups, including the Badger Trust, have suggested the methodology has been improperly costed and posited that culling will prove inhumane and ineffective over the coming trial culls.

Although the UK legal challenge against the cull ended on Tuesday (11th September) when the Badger trust’s case against Defra was rejected in the court of appeal, having been defeated in the High Court in July, there is still an outstanding challenge at EU level.

Humane Society International has appealed to the Bern Convention, responsible for wildlife protection in Europe, against the decision to kill badgers as a bovine TB control measure. However, a response from the Bern Committee may not be issued until November.

26,000 cattle were slaughtered in 2011 as a TB control measure. The government claims that the disease could cost up to £1bn over ten years if infections continue at the current rate. The latest results from Defra show incidences of TB dropped off slightly between 2011 and this year.

Defra maintains culling will reduce bovine TB incidences by around 16 per cent over a decade. However, the evidence behind this comes from trials conducted using ‘trap and shoot’ methodology, which has led cull opponents, including a number of senior scientists who worked on the RBCT trials, to conclude that free-shooting may have a different effect.

The Randomised Badger Culling Trials commissioned by the Labour government concluded after a decade that killing badgers made "no meaningful contribution" to bTB levels and that the approach is "not an effective way" to control disease. Defra documents signed by the department’s scientific advisors acknowledge this.

Opponents believe that killing a minimum 70 per cent of badgers in cull areas may be too high a price to pay for a 16 per cent reduction in TB levels over such a long period of time. They claim that, as there is no accurate information on badger numbers in the UK, this figure will be difficult, if not impossible to calculate. Cull opponents also maintain that cattle measures and a vaccination programme, as have been adopted in Wales where bTB is also a serious problem, would work better than culling.

In response to freedom of information requests covering topics related to the cull, the government has refused to release documents including scientific advice provided by the former chief scientific advisor, Sir John Beddington. Communication with the National Farmers Union, which has lobbied in support of culling, has also been withheld because it constitutes "internal communication," according to Defra.

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