A UK Conservative MP has said “all wild animals” should be culled in response to conservation groups calling for an end to the badger cull.
Richard Drax, MP for South Dorset, made the comments at a debate on farming in the House of Commons. He said that culling badgers has been proven to help stop the spread of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) between farmed cows.
“Can I suggest that rather than talking about stopping culling on badgers and to introduce some other form, that all wild animals have to be culled,” he said. According to Drax, this is because animals such as deer and foxes have no natural predators in the UK, causing their health to “deteriorate.” He added: “We don’t want to wipe them out, we just simply want them controlled.”
More than 210,000 badgers have been killed since the cull began in England in 2013, according to the Badger Trust. The Badger Trust says the cull has not been effective in containing bTB, but the government disputes this.
What a shitshow of a headline, story, source and comments.
The headline leads one to believe he’s an indiscriminate animal killing monster. He’s calling for culling to create healthy populations. Now I have zero idea what that looks like in the UK. But neither am I giving a vegan website much credibility for fairness in reporting this.
As to the badger cull, they post both sides. Good on them! Haven’t read those articles, but the sources seem fair enough. (We’re one of the few US states with zero badgers, what do I know?)
As to beavers, yeah, they can indeed tear shit up. There’s a dam down the road from my camp, and it’s glorious! Totally changed the landscape (several acres) and raised biodiversity, you can tell by hanging around and investigating. One small example; There are wild pitcher plants where there otherwise would be none, and those are endangered here.
Probably not so glorious depending on the intent for that land… I’d gladly turn over my couple of acres of swamp to beavers to make a pond and a creek, maybe not if I relied on that land for food and income.
Badgers in the UK spread TB to farmers cows. They are also protected.
The issue as far as farmers are concerned… is it is impossible to prevent badgers entering the cows enclosure. As they tend to need large fields. Yet if badgers have TB. And treat fields as bears do woods.
Is spreads to the cows. And the law is pretty strict. If one cow is found to have TB. While heard must be destroyed.
Culling is only allowed when significant TB is in the area. Otherwise as I say. The badgers is protected.
If a farmer has a badgers set on his/her land. They are not legally allowed to do anything to harm the area.
Nothing this prick says makes any sense at all. But he is likely trying to appeal to scared desperate farmers with a genuine problem.
He is being indiscriminate. He literally said that “all wild animals have to be culled”. There are tens of thousands of species in the UK. There are maybe only a handful of these species where you could possibly argue that culling is required (when ignoring viable alternative solutions).
It concerns me greatly how easily you trust Drax and how confidently you speak regarding this topic despite knowing nothing about what healthy populations of wildlife in the UK look like.
Drax owns thousands of acres of farmland, he has a vested interest in protecting livestock over wildlife. That alone should make all of us skeptical about anything he says.
The primary reason we’re culling badgers is because of the issues they cause to the owners of livestock. It’s nothing to do with creating a healthy population of badgers.
Drax says that deer need to be culled because otherwise the health of deer will deteriorate. That’s nonesense. Deer are culled because they destroy vegetataion, especially young sapling trees, which is only a problem because we have systematically elimiated all large land predators in the UK over the course of hundreds of years (e.g. wolves, lynx, bears).
If it was about creating healthy populations of wildlife then it would be much more effective to reintroduce these large land predators back into the UK instead of culling. But it’s never been about creating healthy populations of wildlife, it’s about making as much money possible through farming. Therefore reintroducing large land predators is absolutely not an option for livestock owners because large land predators will also prey on livestock.