Rowenna Davis writes:
"Dave" is not his real name. He’s too
scared to tell me that. He’s been a farmer in Devon for over fifty years. He
loves animals and knows everything about cows. He knows their moods, their
temperaments, their individual identities. His family works fourteen hours a
day seven days a week to serve and look after their dairy herd of 1,000, hand
feeding them when they’re sick and nursing them through birth. It’s work of
blood and sweat. He doesn’t shoot badgers, but since the government’s new
trials started he’s been scared his family farm might be a target for animal
rights activists.
"If I speak to you it will have to be
anonymous because we’re terrified to speak up…." He says, "We’re
attacked so easily right out here. It’s very isolated in the countryside and no
dairy farmer can afford extra security right now."
This autumn a new controversy has split British
politics. It’s the biggest rural-urban divide since fox hunting. To deal with
the huge number of cattle being infected with TB, the government is piloting
badger culls. Sites in the south west of the country will be allowed to
shoot these cute little black and white creatures on the grounds that they are
spreading this devastating infection that is killing cattle and crippling
farmers. If the pilots are accepted and rolled out, some 100,000 badgers could be
killed.
Parliament is set to debate the pilots on
Thursday. To date, the argument has divided neatly along left and right lines.
The new Tory environment secretary, Owen Paterson, says that it’s "sad sentimentality" to worry about badgers when so
much damage is being done to the rural economy. On the other side, shadow
environment minister for Labour, Mary Creagh, has called on the government to
abandon the trial, dismissing it as a "shot in the dark". Brian May isn’t
happy and the radical left is advocating the direct action that keeps farmers awake at night . As a
self-declared lefty, I know where my team stands. But I disagree - I think our
values might be better served supporting farmers.
My worry is this. The left has always been the
party of cities and urban areas, growing as it did out of the trade union
movement. It has never had enough to say to rural workers, as I’ve argued
before. I’m worried that the countryside could be reduced to a play park
for urbanites. I’m concerned that it will become a place to protect flora and
fauna, rather than to cultivate jobs and livelihoods. A place to visit at
weekends, rather than strive through the weekdays. The Labour Party was
supposed to be about labour – the clue is in the name – but we seem to be
prioritising the concerns of people without a working connection to the land.
How can Ed Miliband talk about being "one nation", when we have so
little to offer these rural workers?
My friends say they are not against farmers, they
just don’t believe there is any evidence that culling works. The evidence from
the Kreb trial – the most thorough and widely quoted research - demonstrated
that culling could result in a 16 per cent reduction in TB over nine
years. It’s true that the methods used for the current pilots are slightly
different – badgers are being shot outright, rather than caught in cages - and
there was evidence that TB could be spread further unless hard boundaries are
put in place. We can’t dismiss those concerns, but surely if the evidence is
divided, the answer is more trials, not a complete lock down?
More research is urgent, because both sides agree
that TB is devastating the countryside. We know that it has resulted in some
34,000 cattle being sent to the slaughter last year alone. That figure is worth reading again because
it’s almost one death every fifteen minutes. We know that it has cost us as a
country some £500 million over ten years. We know that something has to be done.
Farmers are paying for this pilot themselves
because they say past experience shows that it works. When David
started farming fifty years ago, he used to shoot badgers, and his farm
suffered no TB. When EU regulations made badgers a protected species, he
stopped culling out of respect for the law. Now there are badger sets
everywhere and regular cases of TB are driving them under. This picture has
been replicated at a national level. In 1998 less than 6,000 cows were culled
for TB, now we’ve had 21,512 in the first half of this year alone.
"We don’t want to kill all badgers,"
says Dave, "It’s only when their numbers get out of control that they
start causing infections. Because they have no natural predators, it’s up to us
to keep the numbers down or they take over."
Working so closely with infected animals means
that Dave’s son-in-law came down with TB himself. His family stood by as he lay
in bed rapidly losing weight and coughing, but they still want to keep going.
"My family wish to carry on farming,"
says Dave, “My children have been to college and trained to do it. They love it
and their children love it. It’s in your blood. There are very few other
occupations open to you around here in your 40s."
Animal rights groups and charities say that the
answer is vaccines and increased biosecurity. But there is no credible vaccine
for cows, and the vaccine for badgers is extraordinarily difficult to
implement. The NFU reports that you have to catch each badger in a cage, and
then vaccinate them once every year for four years for it to be effective. As
for biosecurity, the idea that farmers have enough money to invest in
initiatives like full scale separate housing is naïve – and I’m not entirely
sure that ending free range farming is desirable anyway.
It’s difficult to explain how difficult life in
the countryside already is. Back in Devon, one of Dave’s neighbours has
recently gone out of business. The price of milk paid to farmers has been
slashed by 4p a litre this year, and supermarkets continue to sell milk at barely
the cost of production. It’s been too damp to graze outside, so fodder supplies
have been used up and the price of grain is biting. We’ve lost 40 per cent of
our dairy farms over the last ten years and TB is pushing more over the
brink. And all the left is talking about, is the badgers.
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