Badgers and the natural world

Badgers do get bovine TB, and can spread it if they are roaming about farmland on which cattle graze which have it, they may even spread it to neighbouring farms although no proof exists that this is the case. This link between cattle and badgers is not disputed by anyone. But most of the actual spread of this disease is not caused by the small chance of infection from badgers but by the habit farmers have of taking cattle to market constantly, where they are put in pens which have minimal cleanliness standards and where they are breathing close to other cattle, who may be infected. Often also the housing cattle are kept in on farms is dank, damp and filthy, perfect breeding ground for disease, as the Victorian's realised when they cleaned up the housing of the poor and started eradicating human TB.

For livestock farmers, this meeting up at market is a social gathering; they sell a few animals, buy a few calves or lambs, gossip about prices, the weather and whatever else concerns farmers, swap news if any. Sometimes the same animals return to the farm having not been sold, sometimes new ones are introduced.

If animals were kept in clean, dry conditions, and only allowed to go from the farm where they had been raised and had spent their entire lives to the nearest slaughterhouse, there would soon be a drop in cases of TB. Badgers are not the cause but are the unwitting victims of the disease and farming, many of them dying painfully from TB without the benefit of any veterinary care.

Yet a Cotswold livestock farmer concerned that he keep his herd free of disease figured out that cattle get diseases if not fed the correct nutrients including trace minerals and that this could also apply with badgers. So he started leaving mineral cake out where the badgers would find it, and the result has been that the badgers are all healthy, as also are his cattle, while being within a TB hotspot area.

The healthy badgers don't get it and therefore can't spread it. And his herd stays where it is and where it has always been, and therefore doesn't bring it into the farm. Looks like this idea might better be spread around the livestock farming community rather than the constant calls for nationwide culling, which, if rumour is right, is about to be refused by the government. As a means of control, nutrient feeding of badgers would seem a much simpler and cheaper option until a vaccine is developed, than a national cull of the UK's largest and iconic mammal that would set off such an outcry that farmers would become the despised group who had to be protected.