As debate over badger culling, which forms a significant part of the government response to bovine TB, heats up once more in Britain, Defra has released details of stricter biosecurity measures which are to come into effect later in the year.  

Cull licenses became active in June, but reports suggest killing has not yet begun in the two trial areas of Gloucestershire and Somerset. On Monday (12th August), Farming Minister David Heath announced yet more new measures intended to halt the spread of bovine TB.

The new TB rules are focused on the 'edge area' introduced under Drefa's Bovine TB Strategy, published last month. The 'edge area' is the boundary zone between areas of the UK with low and high levels of bTB infection. According to Defra, efforts to combat the disease in 'edge areas' will include increased surveillance, stricter measures to prevent cattle-to-cattle transfer and badger vaccination trials.

Defra said on Monday that "stamping out infection in areas where the disease is spreading… will benefit farmers and livestock businesses by an estimated £27million over 10 years by limiting the impact of bovine TB on their businesses."

Farming Minister Heath added, "We are taking tough and decisive action on TB at the frontier of this disease to stop and then reverse the spread. The measures we are introducing this year will help protect vast areas of England from the scourge of TB and take a significant step towards our goal of eradicating TB within 25 years."

The edge area includes Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Berkshire, Hampshire, and parts of Cheshire, Derbyshire, Warwickshire, Oxfordshire and East Sussex. Heath claimed that, "if left unchecked," bovine TB could spread into new areas, including Greater Manchester, Lincolnshire, Merseyside and West Yorkshire all by 2022.

Details of 'Edge Area' measures

When Defra secretary Owen Paterson unveiled the new strategy in July, which he promised would govern the Defra response to bovine TB in the UK for the next 25 years, Heath acknowledged that some areas of the strategy had not been finalised.

The new edge area measures announced on Monday offer further detail into areas sketched out by Farming Minister in July. These include:

• Immediate skin testing of any herds in Cheshire and Derbyshire within a 3km radius of a farm with a new TB outbreak, and another test after 6 months.
• Herds that have their TB Free status suspended following skin testing will need to show two further clean tests.
• Herds that have their TB Free Status withdrawn will all require gamma-interferon blood testing, which is a more sensitive test for spotting infection.
• Breaking of Cattle Tracing System ‘links’ between the edge area and high risk areas, which allow farmers to move cattle between two areas without reporting the movement.
• Targeted use of the funding for badger vaccination in the edge area. Applications can be made for a share of a £250,000 fund to cover up to half the costs of the first year of new vaccination projects.
• New projects by the AHVLA to estimate likely locations of badger populations in the edge area, and to assess how useful post mortems of badgers killed in road traffic accidents would be in estimating the levels of TB infection in local badgers.

The new measures will be introduced gradually from October 2013. All farms in the edge area are already on compulsory yearly TB testing, and compulsory testing before the movement of any cattle from their farm.

Peter Jones, president of the British Veterinary Association, which has consistently stood behind the government's policies on bTB, commented, "Targeting specific measures at the edge area surrounding the high incidence areas is a sensible approach if we are to stop the advancing spread of this disease further north and eastwards. Additional investment in our knowledge of the disease to help us understand what drives the advancing edge will also be crucial in our holistic approach to tacking this disease."

Shadow Farming Minister Huw Irranca-Davies also welcomed the announcement of further biosecurity measures, but warned that the announcement of measures by the Coalition amounted to "paying lip-service" to tackling the disease. He maintained that the badger cull, a prominent and by now infamous area of government TB policy, will prove "bad for badgers, bad for farmers and bad for taxpayers."

Cull policy in the crosshairs

Although the new measures announced this week deal largely with biosecurity, publicly, the government remains firmly behind its divisive culling strategy, so much so that Prime Minister David Cameron defended the policy on BBC Radio 4 last week. The Prime Minister claimed that, unless culling goes ahead, bTB could cost the UK £1 billion over the next ten years.

He continued, "I think the countryside needs from the Government not just cash and commitment but it needs courage. This does require political courage, but we have that political courage because quite simply it's the right thing to do."

However, Badger trust chair David Williams railed against the Prime Minister's remarks. Williams said, "Mr Cameron told the BBC that there could be '...appalling consequences for badgers' if the culls did not go ahead… It beggars belief that he is forgetting the horrific reality of the slaughter he is backing. More than 100,000 badgers, the vast majority disease free, will be slaughtered or maimed. Nothing could be more appalling than that”.

Culling trials will test the cost effectiveness, efficacy and humaneness of the government's plans to kill around 70 percent of badgers in cull zones, where bTB is rife and badgers are believed to be a vector of infection. Following serious challenges from architects of the influential Randomised Badger Culling Trials conducted under the previous government, who believe the strategy will prove costly and ineffective, the coalition's policy took another weighty blow last week.

It was revealed that, although an estimated 5,500 badgers will be shot during the pilot culls in the South West, the fate of only 120 (4 percent) will be independently monitored for humaneness. Only four Natural England officials will be available to monitor the humaneness of killing in Gloucestershire and Somerset, despite the fact that markspeople carrying out the shooting should have no previous experience of shooting badgers.

Defra maintains it will make up for the lack of independent monitors in the field by conducting follow-up phone calls with shooters, but animal welfare groups have balked at this proposal.

The badger Trust's Mr Williams added on Friday, "Mr Cameron boasts that the Coalition had the political courage to help the countryside, whereas culling will help no one other than those who wish to kill any wildlife at will anywhere.

"Successive governments should have called the cattle industry to heel 20 years ago when it was resisting pre-movement restrictions, cattle movement monitoring and more frequent testing. This tragic outcome followed 20 years of stability with various local badger culling schemes making no difference, and even now the new but long overdue cattle-based policies are not being given time to have an impact before the killing".