Trying to avoid stress, but getting twitchy about TB

I don’t do stress. Well, I like to think I don’t. But everything in life is relative and if the opposite of stress is being “laid-back”, you should see my son and grandson. I’ve often said if my son was any more laid-back, he would fall over.

I was recently taking nine calves to market, but could only take six. Three had to come off the trailer because they were not ear tagged – because the pliers could not be found. This was because they were laid down on a water tank, and a hen snatched them off the top and into the water. Good job we only have one hen.

The nearest I think I do to stress is twitchy, and I’ve been twitchy recently. Not without good cause – it was our TB test week, and nothing on a farm with cattle is more unsettling. Nothing has a greater impact on your business than a TB failure and absolutely nothing you do can influence the outcome. It’s no wonder you get twitchy, or if you are someone else, stressed. You have to wait and see what happens.

I like to plan ahead; to know what I will be doing on the farm in a month, three months or a year in advance. It is part of the challenge to try to plan correctly. All that planning is put on hold with TB. You look at a pen of beef calves and say to yourself: “I’ll sell those next week if we pass the TB test.” But there’s a part of you that knows if you get a reactor, that pen of calves will be with you for at least another four months, which is the best case scenario. Even then you have to find food and room for them, and all the other calves born in the meantime.

Having said that, we passed. I thought no way would we pass, and that background thought plays a big part in making me twitchy. My two closest neighbours had reactors in the past few weeks and the neighbour just the other side of one of them had more than 20 reactors back in the summer. It was a surprise to pass, but as pleasant as you could wish for. We have had a decent milk price and that is starting to have a positive impact, but we lost 19 cattle with TB in 2016 and never had the money to replace them. The milk price was so low at the time, the compensation money went towards paying the rent.

Urban dweller opinions

The letters to the press on TB in badgers continue apace, but I do wonder if the letter writers are conscious of the audience they are writing to.

I read a letter in the farming press that said, among other things, around 23% of dead badgers found on the roads of Cheshire in 2014 were infected with TB. Most farmers would find those statistics very believable. A reservoir of TB in wildlife on that scale cannot be ignored. But they are not the sort of people that need to be told.

The people who need to be told are the urban dwellers who have strong opinions on the subject. The urban dwellers of whose opinions politicians are so afraid, very little gets done. I used to talk regularly to an MP who told me if you totalled everyone up in his constituency who belonged to something – it could be a sports club, women’s organisation, trade union or anything you like – the number who belonged to wildlife groups easily excelled the numbers of all the others.

No wonder the bTB issue has become so protracted, no wonder the situation becomes worse, it is driven by public opinion and not by the reality of science and common sense. I don’t blame politicians; if they seek a career in politics, advocating the culling of badgers would see them down the job centre come the next general election.

If anyone is to blame it is the celebrities who glorify in the adulation they get if they espouse these causes. Like it or not, we live in a society that is driven by celebrity. I saw a discussion on TV where an anti-cull person quoted, triumphantly, an actor from EastEnders was against the cull. Quite what he knew about bTB, I hesitate to guess. Yet, his support was seen as a huge plus for their argument.

Culling deer, but not badgers?

I don’t think many people are sitting on the fence on the issue of badgers and TB. Rarely has a subject been so emotive. I have a friend who is a very quiet sort of man. He is very private, even introverted. I saw him get into an argument about this very issue where he was just one against about six farmers and farm workers – you can guess where their sympathies lay – and he got very animated in his support of the badger.

In fact, his audience was quite taken aback by his reaction. All he knows about farming is what he’s heard in the pub and I suspect he knows even less about badgers. I particularly remember his parting shot – it was his parting shot because he was starting to lose his temper – he said: “Deer get TB and you don’t cull deer for that reason.”

In a society that largely humanises animals, that remark fascinates me. It suggests he wouldn’t mind culling deer for TB, but not badgers. Deer are attractive animals – they have big, soulful eyes. All deer are descended from Bambi – everyone knows that. Where does the badger sit within these perceptions?

I suspect most people see badgers very much as the kindly, helpful badger form Wind in the Willows. Country folk see them as being much less benign. If it was humanised, it would be a sort of latter-day Fagin with a gang of grey squirrels out and about on mopeds stealing mobile phones.

The biggest cost of TB seems to me to be the sort of peripheral impact it has. To my simple mind, the biggest step I can take towards a healthy herd, in the long term, is for it to be closed. We had been closed for years, but I had to buy cows to keep numbers up because of TB. I would like to get rid of bovine viral diarrhoea and Johne’s disease, but, while the threat of TB is hanging over the area, progress on other diseases is made more difficult.

I’ve got three immediate neighbours, all running closed herds, and between us we should have a worthwhile pocket of biosecurity, but we don’t.