Stop Badger Cull petitions

not sure if these have been posted on here already, but all you wildlife lovers who havent yet signed please do & share them....if they can get 100,000 signatures they can ask for this to be debated on in the house of commons..

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/38257



http://www.38degrees.org.uk/page/s/badgers-petition





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Signed

I really think some people will not be happy until all our native wildlife (or vermin in their opinion) has been eradicated.

I have already signed x

It's a difficult call - as with any cull, asuming 'wildlife lovers' should vote against it is a bit 'sweeping' if they're not aware of the reasons.

I know a lot of folk including the Badger Trust are looking at the use of vaccines but from what I understand a 'usable' and 'approved' cattle vaccine and oral badger vaccine are still a long way off.

I'm not suggesting the badger cull is right - but I think it's better that people read up on the reasons for and against it but having done so - also take into account that the government are wise to the fact the culling of badgers by gun would be 'conveniently' self-funded by the farming community.

Yes Phil its a difficult one, but they certainly need to do something. The numbers need to drop significantly purely from a management point before TB even comes into it.

One school of thought reckons it will make less than 1% difference to TB.

Nature, if left to its own devices tends to have a way of managing population control far better than we are, but we will insist on one minute protecting, the next culling

Protection when needed yes, management when successful introduction/recovery is complete.

There is always the vaccination option.
But that costs money.

Unfortunately, the vaccination option isn't proving too successful. The latest, in the USA, is proving just as unsatisfactory as those that have already been tried.

However, on saying that, they seem unsure whether or not badgers really are the culprits anyway. They know it is coming in from wildlife, but cannot definitively say which animal or animals are responsible with any degree of certainty.

Too many iffs and buts for me to start culling.

Taken from an article in the Guardian.

Would badger culling help? The answer is no. And to support this conclusion, we need only look back at the evidence of the Krebs trial, a massive pilot cull of badgers over 10 years between 1997 and 2007, overseen by the Independent Scientific Group (ISG). It is a well-worn argument, but it bears repeating: the trial showed that bTB in the culling area was reduced only marginally. Outside the culling area, it actually rose, a result of what is called perturbation, where badgers who have survived a cull spread out to escape danger. This behaviour does not occur in any other species. The conclusion of this massive trial was that "culling can make no meaningful contribution to the reduction of bTB".

In the weeks leading up to the government's latest announcement, seven former members of the ISG wrote a letter to the Times opposing a proposed cull. They included Lord Krebs, who designed the 10-year trial and is now chairman of the House of Lords science and technology select committee, Professor John Bourne, the ISG's chairman, and Dr Chris Cheeseman, the principal scientist for many years at Defra's Woodchester Park study area in Gloucestershire, where farmers themselves were involved in research into badgers, cattle and bTB. They said there was "no empirical data on the cost or effectiveness (or indeed humaneness or safety) of controlling badgers by shooting, which has been illegal for decades".