Please read the article.
I had a lovely therapeutic day at the Oval today – watching some lovely cricket – many thanks to our friends in the Committee.
But my biggest joy of the day was seeing this letter to Farmers Weekly about our documentary – “The Badgers, the Farmers and Me”.
All credit to the farmer who wrote this piece – you have to realise it takes courage for a farmer to speak up against the propaganda that has been hammered into cattle farmers about badgers and the skin test for so long. And all credit to Farmers Weekly for printing the letter. You might think this a small thing – but after close to 14 years of researching bovine TB it’s a thrill for me to see a farmer realise that we DO have new evidence that’s worth listening to – because it could turn farmers lives around – and free them from the misery they’ve been subjected to for so long. I remember saying to one of our first farmer friends about 10 years ago ” What if we turn out to be RIGHT ? What if we turn out to be your friends, and current policy turns out to be your enemy ?” In those days we were only guessing – but now we have the evidence. I’d love to meet whoever wrote this piece at some point – I’m just grateful that somebody is listening with an open mind. So many things to talk about.
And fascinating that the person he met who reinforced his belief that it was all down to badgers was part of the very same post-RBCT bunch who have been turning out endless papers pushing those very ideas, with far-fetched modelling and fanciful statistical analysis. Well, the Truth will out now. But I won’t be making another documentary about that. I’ll be taking a step back and watching the ripples spread from the large rock we just threw into the pond of TB management.
Bri
#tbfree –
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Just one more thing — please DO watch the documentary – it’s still on BBC IPlayer. But please bear in mind firstly that, although I am the narrator, conclusions in the documentary were arrived at jointly and unanimously by the four of us – a farmer, a vet, a wildlife rescue veteran and me. Also please note that that there are a lot of points left out. The subject is way too complex to cover completely in a 1 hour documentary. We filmed for 6 years and the first edit was 4 hours long ! So please regard the film as an introduction – not a guide-book to the strategy we are proposing, which will be different for every farm. For instance we DO regard slurry as providing a principal channel for infection in an intensive dairy farm like Robert’s, but on a beef cattle farm where the animals are out in the fields there will be no slurry pit and the mechanisms are quite different. There was no time to talk about this in the film, which was aimed at the general public rather than the specialist.
We discovered and quantified other channels for the spread of the bTB pathogen, including importing inadequately tested animals ( including bulls), and mother to calf transfer. But, again, you won’t see this in the documentary. You also won’t see the fact that as soon as we got the TBFree certification (OTF) Dick was not allowed to continue our enhanced testing program. Knowing that we hadn’t been able to finish the job, Robert had to just sit and wait for the inevitable breakdown to occur before he could resume the programme. This is, of course, nuts. There is a desperate need for a change in this directive from DEFRA.
Well, if, like this farmer, you’re interested in a new approach to TB management, please get in touch and join us as we set up our Save-Me TB Management project. There will soon be a dedicated Website – but for now please contact us at SaveMeTrust.org.
— Bri
#tbfree