Hi Are you in Wales,we have been told that they are not going to cull them,but try vaccine,not sure how that is going to work,in the seventies they were using cianide,and we did stop some of them and saved some setts.It just annoys me nothing has been proven,badgers even build there own latrine,and secretworld has been monitoring badgers very few carry tb from the studies over a number of years.Lets hope that soon people will find out the truth and stop prosecuting this poor creature crystalgirl

Me too!! I love badgers. Although sadly during all that very cold weather and deep snow we had several died round here from starvation. Doubly sadly, although maybe it was a blessing in disguise, my 2 boys killed a female whilst OH was walking them. She was just sitting there in the snow, clearly starving and very thin and before OH could leash them, it was all over. Badgers are of course extremely aggressive, so she must have been dying, but I still feel terrible about it.

I think there is little doubt that badgers do spread TB. But the problem lies in the cattle, NOT the badgers. The cattle are so inbred that they no longer have any natural resistance to TB. The "cure" lies not with culling the badgers IMO - simply because you cannot kill every single badger in the whole of Wales, England and Scotland. It would be absolutely impossible as there would always be a few who would escape, to breed and so the whole cycle would start again. You cannot cull them just in a single area, because badgers from other areas would simply move into the "free" territory, and thus start spreading the TB again.

The only solution is to vaccinate the cattle or better still stop inbreeding them and go back to basics, forget about pedigree herds, start again building up the dairy herds from scratch but this time introduce hybrid vigour to allow the cattle to build up the natural immunity.

I am not a cattle farmer, so am only talking from a point of view of common sense, not a knowledge of cattle breeding, but it seems to me that that we need to get to the nub of the matter which is to rebuild the cattle's immunity, not destroy badgers.

The problem is there is no test available that can distinguish between vaccinated cattle, and cattle with TB. The scientific proof says culling badgers will have no effect, its just cheaper than vaccinating cattle.

T'was ever a problem in the West Country too - all trials were invalid coz the ******s killed them anyway even in the 'trial areas' where they were testing other methods.

I've signed for you. I know many 'country folk' with 'country ways' who also don't agree with the cull on badgers.

Signed

That's not good to hear Janitor. I didn't know that. Let's just hope that common sense prevails and scientific proof wins. Thankfully most of the general public, including many farmers, are very anti a badger cull anywhere, even as an experiment. Dr Brian May is not just a brilliant guitarist, he has proved his worth many times over by what he has does to raise the badger profile.

I thought I'd probably already signed but thought it might be a newer one. I had signed before,[based on email address] it won't let you sign again but my husband has now signed.

Labour calls Parliamentary vote on badger cull
http://www.labour.org.uk/labour-call...ull,2013-05-31

Signed,family members too