Analysis: badgers infecting cattle with bovine tuberculosis has been a hugely vexatious issue for decades, but vaccination may offer a solution
Badgers evoke strong emotions. They are at the very foundation of children's stories: think Mr Badger in The Wind in the Willows or The Tale Of Mr Tod by Beatrix Potter. When badgers are targeted, people often feel their childhood is under attack. They are also victims of persecution by people: the verb 'to badger’ says it all.
Badgers’ strikingly striped black and white faces are instantly recognisable. Like other black and white animals such as skunks, this evolved to warn off and tell other animals that they are very smelly, and aggressive, when threatened. The message is ‘do not mess with us’.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Drivetime, zoologist Collie Ennis on Irish badgers
All of this overshadows the debate about the fact that some badgers have bovine tuberculosis. As the late Irish zoologist James Fairley once said, it would be very different if rats, for example, had the disease. Badgers are social carnivores and are prone, like all social carnivores, to diseases that can transmit to humans and other animals, in this case bovine tuberculosis.
Badgers also thrive in countryside set up for intensive cattle rearing. This is because there are relatively fewer people to persecute them, and they eat the boundless earthworms that 'improved' pastures produce. As the numbers of cattle per herd grew and grew in the last century, the numbers of badgers also increased.
Home for badgers are underground dank burrows, called setts. These vast underground labyrinths are dug by generations of badgers, and can go for kilometres. In some ways, these setts resemble human slums and, like them, are ideal for the spread of tuberculosis. Sometimes one third of the badgers are infected, and the disease spreads back and forth, between the badgers and cattle.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Claire Byrne, is badger culling a barbaric practice or necessary measure? With Padraic Fogarty from the Irish Wildlife Trust and TJ Maher from the IFA
Unlike human slums, these setts are frequently surrounded by all sorts of biodiversity including fruit bearing plants such as blackberries and elder, and other animals like foxes, mink, pine martens, cats and rabbits. Foxes in particular seem to seek out badgers’ setts, presumably for protection.
When cattle get infected with bovine tuberculosis and become positive (reactors), they are removed from the herd. This is tragic for the farmer, as cattle who are intimate partners on the farm are suddenly gone. This is especially true of the twice daily milked dairy cows.
It's a hugely vexatious issue and some farmers in the last century went so far as to refuse to allow their cattle to be tested, as nothing was being done about the infected badgers. This led to protests, and some farmers went to jail.
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From RTÉ Archives, Gerry Reynolds reports for RTÉ News in 1990 on the imprisonment of Co Offaly farmers who refused to co-operate with the Department of Agriculture's TB Eradication Scheme because it did not involve action against badgers infected with TB
But the badgers are unreachable, and untested for tuberculosis. Indeed, the idea that we must now pay attention to and manage diseases in wildlife is a new, and terrifying vista, as the Covid-19 pandemic has shown. While diseases have always existed in wildlife, due to deteriorating environments and well as global connectivity, they are now a major threat. Covid-19 is sadly, just the start.
So what can be done? Initially, badgers were removed by culls, which caused great upset and anger. In Britain, culls appear to have led to an upsurge in cattle reactors at the edges of some areas, perhaps due to what are called 'pertubations', a disturbance of the badger population that leads to transmission to cattle.
Vaccination is an obvious solution, and the human BCG (Bacillus Calmette-Guérin) vaccine can be administered to badgers in an injection. Cattle cannot currently be vaccinated as the vaccine is contains an attenuated strain of bovine tuberculosis which makes them react to the test, and is thus illegal in the EU.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's CountryWide, Hannah Quinn Mulligan reports on how Ireland has become a global leader in badger vaccination
The fact that badgers on a small number of off-shore islands were found to be free of bovine tuberculosis, facilitated much of the research effort on the vaccine. Such isolated populations make all research (which on any carnivore is usually difficult), easier. To date, the vaccine is working well with fewer spill-overs from badgers to cattle.
But how is the disease transmitted from badgers to cattle given that badgers avoid cattle? Badgers can and do visit cattle yards, one was even photographed asleep in straw in a cattle trough. These visits peak in summer when badgers are hungry because the ground is dry and worms scarce and cattle are not in yards but outside in the fields. Such visits are much more common in Britain than in Ireland, possibly due to very different badger population densities
A more plausible route is cattle visiting the badgers' setts, which tend to be in hedges here in Ireland. There, they encounter infected surfaces called fomites as recent research in Northern Ireland has shown. Cattle are curious and tend to lick things to find out what they are, which could lead to the ingestion of bovine tuberculosis. As a result, it would be worthwhile to fence off main badgers setts, to keep them out of the reach of cattle.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
