The Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA) has opened a consultation on culling Badgers because of TB. This would mean the indiscriminate killing of Badgers whether they have TB or not.

Badgers are a protected, native species and yet under these proposals thousands face being shot.  At a time when Northern Ireland is the most nature-depleted part of the UK, to propose removing thousands of this keystone species from the countryside is completely unacceptable.

I will outline my reasons to oppose this method to tackle TB being proposed by DAERA.

A) 80% of Badgers do not have TB. So why kill them all.
B ) Other animals carry TB such as deer so it’s unfair to blame it all on Badgers.
C) Culls in England have proven not to be successful and in one case did not even reduce TB incidents in cattle
D) There is a vaccine that protects healthy Badgers from getting TB which is successful, so why not trap Badgers and test them for TB and vaccinate the healthy ones this has been done.
E) Farmers should still be compensated at the market value as they currently do that should not change.

Let’s tackle TB but protect our Badger population, which doesn’t need to be culled indiscriminately in the way proposed.