Public unaware of bTB enormity

It only merited about three column inches in my weekly farming paper – cattle numbers slaughtered due to bovine TB in 2015 had jumped by 10% to 36,270 over the previous year.

That’s some amount of cattle; if they had laid them all out, nose to tail, on the hard shoulder of the M25, they would stretch a very long way. Perhaps only then would the public understand the enormity of what was going on. I chose the M25 deliberately, because it is nearest to all the people who need to know of that enormity.

It’s an unfortunate analogy I know, and I don’t mean to be unkind, but 10 years to 15 years ago, dairy farming was in such a parlous state that, in one year, several farmers had committed suicide. A hard-nosed farmer said to me if they wanted their deaths to make an impact, they should have all got together and done it on the same day – preferably in a supermarket car park.

It sometimes takes a very clear demonstration of numbers to make an impact. It’s probably in bad taste to repeat that, but there is an element of truth in what he said. Only one comment accompanied the bTB slaughter numbers, which was from the deputy president of the NFU, who said the figures made “sombre reading”.

As understatements go, that’s got to be up there with the best of them. Sombre reading – that’s the kind of description I reserve for my bank statements.

Politics

Defra, which is in charge of all this, made no comment. This bTB eradication should be driven by proven science, but it’s not – it is driven by politics, and politicians are keeping well away from unsavoury news until after the referendum. After that we can expect a junior Defra minister to say cases are not up, they have just got better at detecting them. It’s a bit like when you get someone from the Home Office trying to explain away some soaring crime figures by saying crime hasn’t actually gone up, it’s just the reporting that has gone up – as if that is to be of some comfort. What it’s really saying is this level of crime has been going on all the time, it’s just we didn’t know about it. I love watching someone trying to spin a negative into a positive.

Somewhere in the depths of my brain there lurks a glimmer of a memory in maths class at school where there was a means of turning two negatives into a positive. I had to go along with this because that was how things were, but I was always very sceptical.

Most farmers believe the TB problem persists because of the reservoir of infection in badgers. They are fed up with being told they are wrong; to be told by officialdom “we know better” has had its day – it is patronising and clearly isn’t working.

Most farmers believe removing protected status from badgers for a couple of years would put the job right and it seems, in 2015, we had 36,270 reasons to give it a try – not that politicians will ever agree to that. “The people” would never agree and if you were a politician, why would you upset them?

My newspaper yesterday carried a picture of some laying hens in an “enhanced” cage environment. It didn’t look too good, but the welfare group that took the picture would make sure of that. The same article told us eggs were cheaper than they were three years ago – better standards are invariably linked to better returns. You can very rarely have it both ways. At the heart of this animal welfare bTB matter lies the problem of people in the UK humanising animals.

Reintroduction of beavers

I always think writers that have to resort to discussing television programmes lack imagination. But, regardless of that, there’s BBC One’s Countryfile. The naïvety of the programme knows no bounds. I read that, in the ratings war, Countryfile is a huge success. This should be a big plus for those of us living on the land, but it isn’t. The programme gives unfortunates access to all sorts of groups; some of them would be considered minority groups by other people – me, for example. So, enter the “let’s reintroduce the beaver” lobby.

We’re told beavers in the UK were wiped out 400 years ago. This was quoted as a good reason to reintroduce them, never mind we’ve managed okay without them for 400 years. We actually had a well-balanced report on the so-called pluses and were shown some of the damage they can do in the wrong place. For a creature that is extinct, they didn’t seem to have any trouble finding some. The pro-beaver lobby linked the animals to reducing flooding. This is quite clever because the damage caused by flooding has been quite an emotive subject over recent years. If beavers lived in upland areas, we were told, they would build dams that would hold water back and reduce flooding downstream.

We were shown an example where quite a large area was flooded because the beavers had built dams – and therein lies the fault. The area was well-flooded and held a lot of water, but it was full. So, if we were to have the sort of deluge we saw in Cumbria earlier in the year, where would that water go? It would go on downstream just as it always has – and never mind the dams are created by falling trees.

I’ve only felled one living tree in 50 years, and that was because it was leaning over the house and I couldn’t get insurance. If farmers went out with chainsaws doing what beavers do, there would be an outcry. The beaver reintroduction issue may not be strictly a veterinary issue, but it could open the floodgates (an apt description) for other species, such as wolf, lynx and wild boar (which are already a problem).

If beavers were reintroduced, I wouldn’t bet against them being protected, and we all know what that can do – and I bet beavers can get TB.