Myself, Save-Me CEO Anne Brummer, and Lord John Krebs, acknowledged by many as the world’s highest authority on Bovine TB.
Why are we here ?
It’s another step on the long long road towards truth and justice for badgers, honest treatment and hope for cattle farmers, and an end to the pitifully mistaken policy of killing badgers as a way of curbing the spread of bovine Tuberculosis in cattle. This somehow feels like a historic moment. It’s the completion of a circle.
It was 13 years ago that Anne and I embarked on this quest to stop the badger killing, and find the real solution for cattle farmers. Just starting out, we knew very little, and one of the first calls we made for advice was to John Krebs, who opened up his vaults of experience to share with us. At the end of a very long story which includes his supervision of what is still the only proper experiment that has ever been done on the efficacy of badger culling, the RBCT (Randomised Badger Culling Trial), he told us ,”Culling badgers is a crazy idea – it can have no more than a negligible effect on the incidence of TB in cattle”. More than a decade later he is still saying the same thing – the only difference being that now after 10 years work centred on Gatcombe Farm in Devon we have solid practical evidence to confirm that view.
Those of you who saw our documentary have seen some of that evidence (if not, please find it on BBC iPlayer. “Brian May : The Badgers, the Farmers and me”. The tragedy is that then, as now, even under a new government that promised to end the badger cull, nobody in power is taking heed. To date, around a quarter of a million badgers have been killed and the situation for farmers has not improved one iota. And yes, I am aware that papers have been published claiming a different result, but currently they are all being debunked. Around our new farming project,
nobody is talking about badgers. They are irrelevant . It’s ALL about cutting off routes of infection within the herd.
So at our meeting today we talked of a new strategy to turn the Government around to begin a new era of decency and a policy which actually will work.
Bri