Lancashire badger group accuses farming union of misleading members (From Lancashire Telegraph)

disease ridden dangerous animals.

goz wrote:
disease ridden dangerous animals.

Cattle certainly are. They eat sh1t, their bodies are toxic when they are killed but you eat them.

Of course, they taste great right next to the spuds, peas n gravy !!

goz wrote:
disease ridden dangerous animals.

Do you believe every piece of cr@p you read! our wildlife must be protected.
Mass slaughter is not the answer.

Skookie wrote:

goz wrote:
disease ridden dangerous animals.

Do you believe every piece of cr@p you read! our wildlife must be protected.
Mass slaughter is not the answer.

I might ask you the same question ??

Skookie wrote:

goz wrote:
disease ridden dangerous animals.

Do you believe every piece of cr@p you read! our wildlife must be protected.
Mass slaughter is not the answer.

Yes it is.

goz wrote:

Skookie wrote:

goz wrote:
disease ridden dangerous animals.

Do you believe every piece of cr@p you read! our wildlife must be protected.
Mass slaughter is not the answer.

I might ask you the same question ??

I certainly don't, thats why i do not share your view.

You do not share my view because you choose to listen to the other side of the argument. I believe badgers have had protection for far too long, they have decimated herds of cattle FACT, the argument is whether a cull will work and IMO it will. The proof will be the results but again the animal rights groups will twist the results the way they see fit like they did wih the Burns inquiry. Question......you are farmer and you have had your herd checked for TB and its all clear yet the badgers on your land are carriers what would you do ??

............ I would improve my bio-security and treat my non-intensive, organic, Freisian cows as humanely as possible. I may even ask the local badger group for help and advice in trapping, testing, innoculating (and possibly euthanising infected) badgers.

Now here's a funny thing. There are no badgers on the Isle of Man, and yet there is Bovine TB. Makes you think doesn't it?

Catherine Ryal wrote:
............ I would improve my bio-security and treat my non-intensive, organic, Freisian cows as humanely as possible. I may even ask the local badger group for help and advice in trapping, testing, innoculating (and possibly euthanising infected) badgers.

Fair point, if the local badger groups were to pay for it all then am sure most farmers would agree to vaccination and trapping. For a farmer with limited time and a full workload already then a cull or removal of protection to enable the pest to be controlled by third parties is always more cost effective.

Izanears wrote:
Now here's a funny thing. There are no badgers on the Isle of Man, and yet there is Bovine TB. Makes you think doesn't it?

Nobody has ever denied that cattle don't also spread BTb, of course they do but cattle can be dealt with, the Badger is an uncontrollable wild
animal that can wander miles in a night spreading from farm to farm.

When Goz says that "the Badger is an uncontrollable wild
animal that can wander miles in a night spreading from farm to farm", he is being somewhat disingenuous. Although badgers do walk around at night, they generally remain in their home range, with rare trips into the neighbours for food or mating. Badgers are born, live their entire lives and die within 1 mile of where they were born. The idea that they roam across distant parts of the countryside infecting cattle is completely incorrect. The way in which cattle from the south-west will infect cattle in the north-west is when infected cattle are put on trucks and brought north; to provide a serious risk of infection to the clean cattle herds of Lancashire. If this isn't bad enough, an infected bovine can then pass TB on to cats, rats, badgers, deer, moles, foxes, alpacas and, of course, people. This transfer of the TB infection between widely different species was proved when the bovine TB isolates were genotyped by spoligotyping - showing that the same strains of TB followed the cattle as they were exported from the Republic of Ireland to Northern Ireland. To come back to the article, the ONLY risk of TB getting into Lancashire's cattle is importing infected cattle from other areas. The best way to mitigate against the rsik of TB infected milk and meat is to use the bovine TB vaccine; which is currently being used by a dozen or more wildlife trusts (for badgers) and several African governments (for bovines).