21/04/2011

The National Trust has announced it will vaccinate badgers on its lands in Devon against bovine tuberculosis this summer, as part of a four year effort to combat the disease without resorting to culling. The Trust is the first UK landowner to commit to this course of action.

The pilot vaccination scheme will cost the National Trust £320,000 over four years and be conducted on Devon's Killerton estate. Although in principal the Trust is not opposed to a cull, the Killerton scheme makes the case for vaccination as an alternative to culling, after the scientists behind the Krebs trial raised questions about the effectiveness of the Government’s plans for a badger cull in England.

The Krebs trial, or Randomised Badger Culling Trial, the principal UK investigation carried out into badger culling, showed a cull only produced a benefit if it was conducted rigorously and systematically over large areas with hard boundaries that badgers could not cross. Results from a Food and Environment Research Agency (Fera) field trial, published in December, showed that vaccination reduced the incidence of TB in badgers by 74%. The scientists who conducted the Krebs trial said the UK government’s plans, which have the support of the NFU, "risk increasing rather than reducing the incidence of cattle TB".

In particular, they said plans to allow shooting of badgers as they roam would be less effective than the trap-and-shoot method deployed during the trial. An oral vaccine, the ideal solution as it would avoid the need for trapping badgers, is still thought to be five years away, meanwhile bovine TB costs the UK an estimated £100m each year.

David Bullock, the Trust's head of nature conservation said, “This is a pilot project - it's not research, not a trial - we know the vaccine works, and we're going for it. The driver is that we want to reduce the risk of bovine TB breakdowns in cattle herds belonging to our tenant farmers, 18 of whom are involved in this project - and we also want to see that the vaccine is considered nationwide."

CLA says scheme will prove ‘too slow’ to tackle bTB

However, the Country Land and Business Association today said that the vaccination scheme would prove too slow to save vulnerable herds, arguing that it would not cure badgers who are already infected.

CLA South West director, John Mortimer, said, "This disease is out of control. It is decimating dairy and beef farms across our region and, while any action to tackle it is to be applauded, vaccination can only protect healthy animals from contracting the disease, it cannot cure infected animals. So the science still has some way to go – and now is, perhaps, not the time to be experimenting with something which is largely unproven within a large-scale deployment."