The Humane society has criticised Princess Anne over controversial statements the royal is set to make on BBC's Countryfile programme this weekend.  

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Humane Society (HSI) executive director Mark Jones criticised Princess Anne for wading into the badger cull debate, which made a return to the front-pages yesterday when environment secretary Owen Paterson announced in Parliament that the government would press ahead with culls in Gloucestershire and Somerset.

Mr Paterson revealed that, although the culls would not be rolled-out to new locations, as had originally been his intention, they would continue in the two pilot areas, this time without independent assessment. The Independent Expert Panel, whose report into the first year of culling in the South-West was released on Thursday to coincide with the Defra Secretary's address, found that the culling project had failed to meet two of the three targets the government had set itself ahead of the pilots.

In an interview for Countryfile, due to be broadcast on Sunday 6th April, Princess Anne will speak about the acutely controversial culls. The Radio Times has already reported that the Princess Anne will say that she supports gassing as a means of killing badgers.

After independent assessment revealed that contractors in last year's badger culls fell well short of their kill-targets, even though they had resorted to better-established caged-shooting by the third day of culling in both trials, pro-cull groups have turned their attention to other means of dispatch.

Gassing was made illegal in the early 1980s, after government trials found it to be unreliable and inhumane. However, Owen Paterson admitted that Defra is conducting desk-based research into resurrecting gassing in the immediate wake of the culls. During the culls, evidence that illegal badger gassing is rife in the South West was uncovered by an investigative reporter.     

Mark Jones, himself a veterinarian, said on Thursday that Defra's culls had been "discredited." On Friday he added, "It is extremely disappointing that a prominent member of the royal family should endorse the gassing of a supposedly protected indigenous wild mammal. Gassing experiments carried out at Porton Down in the early 1980s were abandoned because of the appalling levels of suffering to which the badgers were exposed.

"Lethal concentrations of gases in complex badger sets are difficult to achieve, making sub-lethal exposure and associated suffering highly likely. Any attempt to reintroduce gassing would doubtless result in a slow and painful death for many badgers, and potentially other non-target animals."

Jones reiterated calls to end the badger cull, adding, "Moreover, the government’s own figures clearly show that badgers don’t need to be culled to halt the spread of bovine tuberculosis. In Wales, the reintroduction of annual cattle testing and other cattle-based measures resulted in a 48 percent reduction in the number of cattle slaughtered because of bovine TB over a four-year period, in the absence of any badger culling. Princess Anne should be better informed before making public statements on such controversial and divisive issues."

HSI was also highly critical of views Princess Anne – a passionate horse-rider – has expressed in relation to the horsemeat scandal.