Badgers on a pedestal – but what about cattle?

It’s a strange phenomena and I can’t get my head around it. If you asked most cattle farmers what they thought about badgers, their answers would be unprintable.

If you told them badgers were to lose their protected status and be declared pests, it would be a cause for celebration.

If you asked “what next?” they would probably say, within a couple of years, badger populations would reduce and TB in cattle would show a marked decline.

Cattle farmers are a minority within the population at large, but they represent a law-abiding, hard-working section of society, and those would be firmly held views.

I hesitate to mention TV programmes; I think if you write, you should have your own ideas, but I will reference an edition of Countryfile.

Countryfile is important in all of this, not least because it is estimated more than eight million people watch it every week.

TB reservoir

The Countryfile presenter was lucky enough to have been sent to New Zealand and the programme showed his visit to an idyllic stock farm. It showed a herd of Welsh black cattle being TB tested. Viewers were told TB used to be a bigger problem in New Zealand than it is in the UK; now, it is hardly a problem at all.

“How did you achieve that?” Adam Henson innocently enquired (as if he didn’t know the answer). The vet replied: “We addressed the reservoir of TB in wildlife, possums.”

I’m sure I’ve read stories of poisoned bait being shovelled out of helicopters, killing every possum and everything else that ate it. Let’s just hope eight million viewers heard that.

Mr Henson does a good job on the TB front, because when his own cattle are being tested, he shows genuine distress should cattle fail.

By and large, the rest of the UK population puts the badger on some sort of pedestal – an animal that should be protected at all costs. It manifests itself in the large number of earnest letters written to the press that oppose the cull. Protecting it at all costs means thousands of cattle are euthanised, but that’s okay.

Protected status

There was a policeman around here (now retired) who I often used to meet in his car around the lanes. Most lanes around here are so narrow you have to stop to pass someone. If I met the policeman, he would wind the window down and we would have a chat.

I met him one day and he stopped, but said: “I can’t talk today, there’s ‘badger baiters’ in the area.”

He took off at great speed, blue light flashing. There were police cars and helicopters about all day. I doubt they would have shown more urgency had the local cashpoint been pulled out of the wall. It serves to show just how high in life’s priorities badgers have become.

There is a very real view badger baiting has given the badger protected status, and the TB problem in cattle is a direct result.

I used to be very proud of the large numbers of hares on my land – I saw their large numbers as a sort of barometer I was farming in an environmentally friendly way. Those hare numbers have been decimated by hare coursers.

The police don’t show the same concern for hares as badgers. Their attitude is clearly “if you shot all the hares, the coursers wouldn’t come” – another attitude I can’t get my head around.

I know of a farmer with two farms about five miles apart. On the main farm is his dairy herd and young replacement cattle. On the other farm he mostly keeps sheep.

At the main farm, he grazes his milking cows and makes his silage in the nearer accessible fields, and on the fields at the periphery he grazes his young cattle. These fields on the periphery are steeper, higher and bordered by woods and dingles – make of that what you will.

He keeps getting TB in his young cattle, which obviously closes the whole herd down. He did run a few beef cattle with the sheep at the other farm and never had TB issues there.

So, he decided to bring the sheep to graze the outside fields at the main farm and took all his dairy replacement heifers to graze the other farm – and it worked. He put into practice good common sense biosecurity and he is to be commended, but there’s a bit more to it than that.

On the away farm is his purpose-built lambing shed and, on the home farm, his purpose-built young stock accommodation. Every spring he has to transport all his ewes and lambs to their summer grazing, and all his replacement heifers to theirs – and, come autumn, – the whole procedure is reversed.

The time and cost involved is huge. It illustrates how the TB issue can take over how you think, how you plan and, if you let it, your very life. Nowhere is the cost of this sort of extra work calculated. It’s just a part of the costs of bTB farmers have to pay.

No confidence

We passed our latest 60-day test. I was surprised, I had no idea what to expect.

It feels sort of okay, but the result has not been greeted with an outbreak of euphoria, probably because we need to pass again next time, and to be clear as a herd for it to make any tangible difference to our lives and how we farm.

I have no confidence at all we will go clear – we just have to wait another 60 days to see. I could do without so much uncertainty in my life.