England has continued to issue permits allowing people to kill badgers to protect cattle from disease, despite local extinctions and scientific evidence stating that badger culling is not the best way to protect bovines. What’s happening?
The Guardian reported that it accessed leaked documents showing that England’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs issued 17 new licenses in June that allow people to kill badgers. The publication explains that badger culling has been used in the country for years to stop the spread of bovine tuberculosis to cattle and has led to local extinctions.
However, scientific reports have shown that culling badgers is not the most effective way to stop the spread of this disease, and DEFRA’s decision overrules the advice of its own scientific adviser, Peter Brotherton, director of science for Natural England.
Thanks for sharing this. When I saw the headline, I knew there was going to be at least one better solution to the problem, but it was going to have an economic cost.
The western United States is going to kill half a million Barred Owls to try to save the endangered Spotted Owl. The Barred Owls have only moved in due to the destruction caused by the timber industry and climate change. Studies have showed a number of factors, like those I just mentioned, and also the more niche requirements of the Spotted Owl losing out to the more aggressive and adaptable Barred Owls. The only avenue that is being pursued is the owl killing, not better industry regulation. There has been legislation passed to protect the environment somewhat, but there are some major loopholes that still let the same destructive practices continue though.
How they expect to save the owl while still allowing the very specific habitat it needs to be destroyed is beyond me, and seems to be the same kicking of the can down the road that you mentioned.
I know its complicated but, for me at least, the fact that we have to continuously intervene to prevent the harm done by our system shows that it’s a bad system. And also, why does the response so often have to be killing something/someone?
I’m starting to believe it was never that great of a system. I think many recent events around the world have really removed much of the veneer and we’re seeing we aren’t as far from feudalism as we wanted to believe. To keep it simple as I believe class systems work a bit different between the US and Europe, but it seems the only real change has been the merchant class replacing the nobility. With governments essentially outsourcing to industry the drafting of legislation and regulation, they’ve maintained their positions of power, and we’re allowed to be peasants as long as we’re good consumers. No one seems to like when we question where things come from or what the overall price of goods and services are.
I deleted a reply to another thread yesterday about America’s 2 party system as I didn’t want to get into it with that many people in a political community, but here, the right feels like the robber barons of the early 1900s, who want to toss all the regulations on industry and just bleed everything dry for what it’s worth, and our left feels like the colonialists who see the majority of us as lesser people that just need to be more like them, while not allowing most of us to have the success many of them were born into.
To steer back to our actual topic, killing is cheap, quick, and to the goals of both of the mentioned groups above, it does accomplish their goals. Whether that be people, animals, or the environment, the limitations seem to vary by country, but we all seem to be compromised to a large extent. There was another UK article posted on Lemmy yesterday about how when you go outside now, you hear silence more than seeing the insects, birds, and other animals many of us saw when we were kids (I assume were talking about those of us around the 40+ age at this point), and we have the same types of articles here. There were so many butterflies, fireflies, mantises, grasshoppers, rabbits, owls, foxes, and deer here when I was a child, and where I live feels so devoid of life now in comparison. I can only imagine what it was like before the age of industry. That we can see and feel this loss, but still keep heading down this path makes me ill.
My thoughts on the owl situation here it to let them hybridize. The native Spotted Owls era seems to have passed. We’ve destroyed too much of what they need, and forests need 100-200 years to really support life like this. Current breeding and release programs for this particular owl don’t work well. The Barred Owl is very adaptable, seemingly too well for its own good. The are currently cross-breeding and have resultant children. Perhaps this new owl could preserve some of the Spotted Owl genes, instead of us losing it altogether. But the hybrids are currently killed as well. Some success seems better than none, and this seems to be nature’s solution to what we’re doing. The planet seems to know better than we do what works.
I hope this wasn’t too negative and gloomy. I typically avoid this stuff here, as I’m more about the conservation than the politics and wish to spend my time doing more positive posting, but they very much overlap. Many of the politics here are a bit too extreme for me, and I just don’t want to get sucked into that, but this seemed a reasonable place to share some of my thoughts.