Animal Aid

The government will today announce that the cull of badgers, which was due to start imminently, will now not take place. Reports indicate that the policy has not been abandoned altogether but there will be no cull this year. This is, in part, because the number of badgers in the pilot cull areas was recently found to be so much higher than previously thought. Farmers were not prepared to pay for 70 per cent of them to be killed – the amount that the government argues must be killed in order to see a potential 16 per cent reduction of bovine tuberculosis in cows.

We will give more details as they emerge.