Cornish farmers lead badger vaccination trial

Farmers in Cornwall are exploring how effective and practical the delivery of scaled-up badger vaccination can be as part of a comprehensive bovine TB eradication strategy.

The project, which will run over the next three years, is being delivered by the NFU in partnership with the Zoological Society London (ZSL) and has been allocated £1.4m in funding by Defra.

It focuses on three designated areas and will provide scientific evidence to support the Labour government’s commitment to end badger culling by 2029.

See also: Labour accelerates plan to end badger culling

A previous study, implemented on a small scale by ZSL and the Cornwall Wildlife Trust, found that the number of badgers testing positive for exposure to TB dropped from 16% to zero over four years of vaccination.

Rosie Woodroffe, a professor at the Institute of Zoology at ZSL, said: “If badger vaccination is going to be something that we recommend to farmers and to policymakers, then we need to show that we can replicate that success at a larger scale.”

Project outline

So far, 70 farmers and landowners have joined the project in a bid to address TB in badgers and to establish if vaccinating them can reduce the number of outbreaks in cattle.

The project area covers roughly 90sq km, with the hope of expanding to 500sq km in the next three years.

Cornwall is classed as a high-risk bovine TB area and between April 2024 and March 2025 saw 2,162 cattle slaughtered, a small decrease from the previous period where 2,454 were killed.

Herd incidence, a calculated measure of the rate at which new TB incidents are being detected in an area, also fell to 11.6 from 12.9 for the 2024-25 period.

The project will pilot three different vaccination approaches to determine which delivery model works best at scale in a cost-effective way:

• Standard Approach Annual vaccination over four years, following the current badger vaccination guidelines.
• Intermittent Vaccinate every other year (years one and three) with the aim of reducing delivery costs and enabling faster expansion.
• Targeted Reactive vaccination based on TB breakdown holdings and nearby farms.

Through blood tests, the project will track the effectiveness of vaccination within the badger population and will use cameras to estimate badger population densities, vaccination coverage and badger recovery rates in post-cull areas.

ZSL’s team of vaccinators will work with industry to train farmers and landowners in the area to increase the capacity for vaccination delivery, ultimately in the long-term allowing more landowners to access badger vaccination, where appropriate, as a means of disease control.

Measuring success

To determine if vaccination has been successful, Prof Woodroffe said many factors came into play.

“If your measure of whether vaccination of badgers is working by looking at TB in cattle, then you have to bear in mind that cattle get TB from a whole array of different places.

“Molecular genetics shows that most cattle which get TB get it from other cattle. So if you vaccinate the badgers and the cattle still have TB, then there are two possible explanations for that,” she said.

What needed to be established was whether the badgers were the source of TB in the first place.

“That’s why we have taken this approach and why we’re testing the badgers themselves,” she added.

Worth a try

Cornish dairy farmer Bridget Whell, who has been under TB restrictions for more than 15 years, has signed up to participate in the project.

While she remains sceptical, she said there was nothing else out there now and the badger cull in her area had come to an end after six years.

“We’ve had two brief releases from restrictions but went right back under again,” she said. “We are still under restriction.”

While fewer animals are now testing positive for TB in the 1,200-strong dairy herd, it remains a financial problem.

“It’s really directed the management of our farm, because we can’t manage it as we would like with animal movement restrictions.”

Having lost half the herd from a second dairy about seven years ago, Ms Whell has a strong motivation to find a solution.

“There’s a lot of personal motivation to make sure we do whatever we can to understand more, but also to eradicate the disease.

“I’m hoping that the vaccination project will help us to get more information about how it works within wildlife and gain some insight into how it’s being spread.”