Badger culling in the United Kingdom

rdf:langString Badger culling in the United Kingdom

rdf:langString Badger culling in the United Kingdom is permitted under licence, within a set area and timescale, as a way to reduce badger numbers in the hope of controlling the spread of bovine tuberculosis (bTB). Humans can catch bTB, but public health control measures, including milk pasteurisation and the BCG vaccine, mean it is not a significant risk to human health. The disease affects cattle and other farm animals (including pigs, goats, deer, sheep, alpacas, and llamas), some species of wildlife including badgers and deer, and some domestic pets such as cats. Geographically, bTB has spread from isolated pockets in the late 1980s to cover large areas of the west and south-west of England and Wales in the 2010s. Some people believe this correlates with the lack of badger control. In October 2013, culling in England was controversially tried in two pilot areas in west Gloucestershire and west Somerset. The main aim of these trials was to assess the humaneness of culling using "free shooting" (previous methods trapped the badgers in cages before shooting them). The trials were repeated in 2014 and 2015, and expanded to a larger area in 2016 and 2017. In 2019, UK-wide policy of badger culling existed, but in 2020, extending the areas in which culls took place to include parts of Oxfordshire, Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, and Derbyshire was proposed, with a view to killing some 60,000 animals.