Like reports of Mark Twain’s death, it seems that reports of the end of badger culling have been exaggerated.

Bovine tuberculosis (TB) is a terrible problem for British farmers, and the government hopes to eradicate it. Most cattle are infected by other cattle, but a small proportion are infected by wild badgers. For this reason, a centrepiece of England’s TB policy has been a mass slaughter of badgers, with coast-to-coast cull zones already covering an area larger than Wales. The policy is expensive, unpopular, and unlikely ever to eradicate TB, so it was a relief when, back in March, the government published a policy document explaining how and why culling would be phased out and replaced with badger vaccination.

This policy announcement was bolstered by a High Court judgement last week, which found that the government had been within its rights to deny a culling licence in Derbyshire, where a high-profile badger vaccination project was in operation. With the phase-out of culling announced in Whitehall and successfully defended in the courts, it seemed that badger culling was on the way out.

Except it wasn’t.

Rightly or wrongly, the new policy focuses mainly on vaccinating badgers in areas which have come to the end of their initial four-year culling licences. In 2019, culling licences expired in seven areas, totalling over 3,000 sq km (about the size of Gloucestershire). Any or all of these seven areas could have been used to pilot post-cull vaccination as laid out in the new policy. But on 15^th May the government licensed five more years of badger killing in every one of them.

In contrast, the government has made no announcement of how, where, or when it plans to support vaccination in former cull zones. Certainly there can now be no post-cull vaccination until 2021 when another 10 initial cull licences (covering nearly 5,000 sq km) will have expired.

Rather than supporting badger vaccination, another new government announcement looks set to allow culling to proceed in Derbyshire this year. The legal arguments about culling in Derbyshire centred on the risk that vaccinated badgers would be killed. The government had licensed (and part-funded) badger vaccination in Derbyshire and wished to avoid licensing a cull which risked killing some of those same animals, a decision challenged in court by the National Farmers Union. The judgement revealed that the National Farmers Union had declined a government offer to allow culling to proceed as long as it avoided buffer areas around vaccinated land. Having won the legal argument, the government has announced a public consultation on designating such buffers, laying the groundwork for culling to expand into areas where vaccination projects operate. This is a public consultation and you can respond. I will post my response on this blog. But it doesn’t look like the commitment to expanding vaccination that was outlined in the policy.

There are good reasons to replace badger culling with vaccination gradually: I discussed them previously on this blog. But a replacement, however gradual, does need to start somewhere. Committing to prolonged culling of all the areas where vaccination might have begun is no start at all. And farmers will never be convinced that vaccination is likely to be more effective than culling, as well as cheaper and more humane, if vaccination is consigned to small islands in a sea of culling.