Badger Cull

Latest Articles

Badger Cull
Page Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Downsizer traders

Downsizer Forum Index -> Land Management

Author

Message

Gervase

Joined: 17 Nov 2004
Posts: 6193
Location: Ceredigion, West Wales

Posted: Thu Nov 05, 09 7:38 pm Post subject:

I was talking about this today with a vet and a farmer as we struggled with a pile of Edwardian farm machinery. The consensus was that the badger population has exploded in the past five years or so, and so has the incidence of TB among badgers. Some 90 per cent of roadside badger corpses around here test positive for TB.
As a result of that population explosion, a heck of a lot of setts have been seeing a boom in young males.
This leads to fighting (which causes sepsis, bleeding and shedding of TB bacilli around the sett) and also forces males to migrate to new territories, covering several hundred acres in their search. The badgers' urine contaminates the grass wherever it goes, and thus is passed to cattle.
As for the solution, neither the farmer nor the vet had one, other than to control the population as with deer to stop over-population and enforced migration. Then someone said, "There's no bloody TB in Scotland," and we were all stumped.

welshboy454

Joined: 21 May 2009
Posts: 64

Posted: Thu Nov 05, 09 8:43 pm Post subject:
My farming neighbour has no tb and he thinks the badgers without tb tend to keep the area/setts protected from migration of sick badgers. He says that when a badger becomes ill with tb the rest eject him from the sett so he has to migrate to fresh ground- haven't seen or read any evidence of this though.

Dr Rob

Joined: 04 Sep 2008
Posts: 146
Location: Moylgrove, nr Cardigan, Pembs

Posted: Sun Nov 08, 09 1:54 pm Post subject:
There's a conference 'Saying ''no'' to the badger cull' at the Welsh Wildlife Centre, Cilgerran, nr Cardigan on Thursday 19th December 2-4pm. It's chaired by Iolo Williams and other speakers include Dr Dan Foreman of Swansea University and Sarah Kessell, CE of the Wildlife Trust of South & West Wales. Hope to see some of you there.

	Downsizer Forum Index -> Land Management	All times are GMT Page Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Page 6 of 6

View Latest Posts