Infra-red cameras that fit on top of drones, and devices that can track the signal from police radios: if the new tactics used by anti badger-cull activists appear almost military, that’s because they are.
A leading activist in the protest group Stop the Cull, Jay Tiernan, previously served in the British Army’s Royal Corp of Signals and has helped propel the movement’s technological upgrade.
But don’t mistake this army-like organisation for aggression. Jay left the armed forces when he could no longer reconcile himself to killing for a living – or even to eat: “I convinced myself to go vegetarian and became philosophical to the point where I believed that all life should be treated equal,” he says. He later stepped down from the fox-hunt saboteur movement because he found the risk of becoming caught up in a brawl too great: “I didn’t want to have to be worrying about that.”
In contrast, disrupting a badger cull carries less risk of person-on-person confrontation. Law-abiding protesters look out for badger traps near their local walks, Jay says, and inform others who are willing to go out and destroy them. More-involved activists also attempt to track down the groups of trained marksmen who gather to shoot the badgers. By simply revealing their presence, the activists can force the marksmen to leave the area for safety reasons, he explains.
Yet despite the emphasis on non-direct confrontation, the costs to the state of policing badger culls are still substantial. In 2016 the police costs in Somerset alone reached more than £700,000 – equivalent to £3,277 for every badger killed. Jay himself received a suspended sentence for breaching an injunction designed to keep him away from those involved in the culls.
Many farmers hold that killing badgers is a necessary part of the Government’s wider 25-year strategy for eradicating bovine tuberculosis in cattle. How else could isolated herds be contracting the infection other than via the disease-carrying badger, they ask?
But campaigners and scientists dispute this logic, pointing to the detection of the disease in everything from soil, to sheep and cats. Professor Rosie Woodroffe from the Zoological Society of London has told the Guardian that the benefits of culling remain “uncertain”. While according to Lord Krebs, who worked on a massive pilot cull between 1997 and 2007, the present government trial was not set up as a legitimate experiment, has not monitored badger numbers properly, and has no independent oversight.
The result is spiralling antagonism, both online and in the fields. Over the last week I’ve listened on the phone as one anti-cull campaigner broke down in tears: “If we can’t live with our wildlife in a country as wealthy and educated as this, what hope is there for the rest of the world?” she said. She also asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution from cull supporters – a fellow campaigner once had an “eviscerated” badger nailed to her gate, she told me.
On the other hand, I’ve spoken to farmers whose distress at losing their livestock shouldn’t be under-estimated. David Barton challenges anyone to not be moved by the video of his diseased cows being shot on his farm in Gloucestershire: “I’m getting out of beef because I can’t emotionally carry on doing this,” he says in the National Farmers Union-sponsored film. There are also claims that the anti-cull protestors resort to intimidation too – like this Tory MP, who in 2013 accused anti-cull “scroungers” of leaving a dead badger on his doorstep.
So why has the debate reached such deadlock? And with the cull set to be extended to 11 new areas this autumn, raising the possibility of up to 33,347 badger deaths, is this mutual mistrust set to become endemic?
Political history plays a part here. In 2013, Patrick Barkham, argued in the Guardian that there were symbolic reasons why it was beneficial for David Cameron’s government to show solidarity with rural communities over the cull. And after Theresa May’s campaign U-turn on scrapping a fox hunting vote, there is little chance she will want to undo that work.
The welfare debate also has aspects which undermine hope of reconciliation. Jay Tiernan is vegan, for example, and is heavily opposed to many aspects of mainstream cattle farming in the UK. He doesn’t “hate” farmers for this, he explains, because hate is unproductive – in fact he admires the hard work they put in. But this doesn’t extend to sympathy for their situation. “I used to be a soldier and would have killed for money, so who am I to judge,” he says, “but I don’t have sympathy for them: they should get another job.”
Some vegan views are problematic for farmers. It not only reduces their market, but can also be seen as a moral judgement on their whole profession. It all adds to a feeling of being ganged up on by activists and left-wing politicians.
When Green Party co-leader Jonathan Bartley called for the government to “fully roll out a humane vaccinations programme for both badgers and cows”, farmer David Barton found the statement “irresponsible and stupid” – considering there is at present no such cattle vaccine available to farmers. While farmer Philip Latham tells me the idea he dislikes badgers couldn’t be further from the truth – he even has a hide on his farm from when he spent hours watching them as a boy.
Yet perhaps most problematic of all is the heightened focus on badgers, rather than on other ways the disease spreads. The government’s latest report concludes that the unadjusted incidence rate ratios “revealed no statistically significant differences” between cull and non-cull areas – and says that more monitoring and analysis is necessary. But with pro-cull sympathisers often citing research that showed culling reduced TB in cattle by up to 16 percent, and anti-cull sympathisers citing the cover letter to the same report, which said culling could “make no meaningful contribution to cattle TB control”, there is little to suggest that new analysis won’t fall into the same black hole.
The result? A public ever less trusting of the value of evidence. “The data that has just come out has divided farmers and scientists,” says David Barton. “As ever they can do what they want with it and make it work for them.”
Surely a more productive solution is improved support for research into other aspects of disease control, such as improving cattle testing as I wrote about here? Even the National Farmers Union says it “would like to improve cattle testing and believe that the best way to do that would be through research on better diagnostics”.
More research will cost more money, but so will killing badgers. And as Brexit approaches, we must improve confidence in our disease control – or risk digging our farming industry its own very big hole.
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