Church calls for TB badger cull

Another candidate for the "You Can't Make This Stuff Up" department-

Church leaders say a badger cull is "necessary" to stop the out-of-control TB virus ruining the West's farming industry.

The Anglican Church in Somerset has now called for urgent talks to help solve the problem of TB in cattle.

And the Bath and Wells Diocese has made it clear it considers a cull an essential move – despite campaigners' pleas that it is not the answer.

Chairman Tom Done said: "No one, including most farmers, wants to see a mass cull of all badgers but in the interest of cattle, badgers and farmers it will be necessary to control the badger population so that we can have healthy setts and herds."

TB is out of control across the South West and is threatening to engulf the rest of the country.


There have already been devastating consequences for livestock: last year 20,000 cattle had to be slaughtered on the region's farms, 2,816 new TB cases were reported – a 40 per cent increase on 2007 – and at the end of the year there were 4,000 herds under restrictions.

Farmers are compensated for animals compulsorily slaughtered but the Government has imposed lower payments in an attempt to reduce the millions of pounds it spends on the disease each year. One Somerset farmer recently received £200-a-head less for a group of slaughtered animals than he had paid for them at auction weeks before.

http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/wdp/news/Church-calls-TB-badger-cull/article-742908-detail/article.html