Badger cull cost claims ‘misleading’, says DEFRA

DEFRA has accused an animal welfare charity of making “misleading” claims about the cost of pilot badger culls.


The charity Care for the Wild claimed that the pilots in 2013 cost £7.3m, according to “official sources and Freedom of Information (FOI) requests”.


The charity also estimated the culls cost £4,121 for each of the 1,771 badgers killed across the two pilot counties of Somerset and Gloucestershire.


Responding to the claims, DEFRA said it was “misleading” to make an assessment of the pilots at this stage as “certain parts of the pilots have not been calculated yet and fully verfified”.


The charity has estimated the policing costs for year one of the four-year culls at £2.6m.


DEFRA said the policing costs were “still to be calculated”. But it conceded that “significant” police resources were likely to have been expended on responding to a widespread campaign of criminality and intimidation perpetrated by a “handful of individuals”.


The NFU said policing costs would have been much lower if marksmen had been allowed to go about their lawful business and not been disrupted by the activities of protestors.


A DEFRA spokesman said the true costs of the pilot badger culls were still being estimated and would be revealed at a later date.


He added: “The costs of the badger cull pilots are vastly outweighed by the impact that bovine TB is having on our farming industry and taxpayers.


“Each bovine TB cattle outbreak costs an average £34,000, and if left unchecked this disease will cost the taxpayer £1bn over the next 10 years.”


But Dominic Dyer, policy advisor for Care for the Wild, said: “Frankly, it should be the government doing these sums, honestly, and telling the public. We shouldn’t have to be doing this.”


He described the cost of the badger cull as “outrageous” and insisted that its impact on bovine TB will be “negligible, if not negative”.


“Bovine TB is a farming problem, and the answer will come from within farming. We’re genuinely sympathetic to farmers, but they’re being sold a false solution.”


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Bovine TB and the badger cull