On Friday evening, badger cull licensing body Natural England granted the Somerset cull-company permission to extend culling activity until the 1 November.

Defra lawyers confimed Natural England's ruling later Friday.

The cull officially came to a close on 6 October, but markspeople in the zone did not manage to reach their kill targets, so the pilot cull's organisers applied to extend culling for a number of weeks. The Gloucestershire cull company has also appealed for more time which it is expected to receive, in light of Somerset's three week extension.  

Reporting to MPs on the outcome of the Somerset pilot earlier in the week, environment secretary Owen Paterson acknowledged that shooters employed by the pilot zone's cull company had not managed to reach their target of killing 70 percent of badgers in the area. Shooters in Somerset managed to kill 850 badgers, 40 percent of their initial target, but new population estimates introduced in Wednesday's statements suggest there are around a thousand fewer badgers in the Somerset cull zone than was previously thought. Based on this latest recount, 59 percent of badgers in the cull zone were shot over the 40 day trial cull.  

No official data is available for the Gloucestershire cull zone.