Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-51)
PROFESSOR JOHN
BOURNE, PROFESSOR
CHRISTL DONNELLY,DR
ROSIE WOODROFFE,
PROFESSOR H CHARLES
J GODFRAY FRS AND
DR CHRIS
CHEESEMAN
7 FEBRUARY 2006
Q40 Chairman: Thank you. Professor Godfray?
Professor Godfray: At one level
of abstraction I think what one can say at the moment—and
this is only partially helpful—is that there are certain
things that you can do that will do no harm and will probably
do good. Working on the cattle to cattle transmission, working
on better diagnostics and working on farm biosecurity will all
clearly help and may make substantial progress to getting below
the threshold that Professor Donnelly has just mentioned. Where
the badger culling is different is we do not now think that increasing
badger culling, reducing the population of badger, will necessarily
do good; it probably will ultimately if you get to eradication,
but at least in the short term it may be counter-productive and
move you away from this eradication threshold that you are trying
to get at.
Q41 Lynne Jones: Defra says that it bases
its policies on sound scientific advice, yet it is clear from
your comments on the consultation document that it is badly framed
and ignores scientific evidence. To what do you attribute this
difference between what you as scientific advisers that they have
appointed are telling them and what they actually are disseminating
in these documents? Why have they not listened to you?
Professor Bourne: It has been
puzzling to us for some time because, consistently, the Secretary
of State has commented that a TB control policy must be based
on sound science, yet over the past 18 months Mr Bradshaw and
also the Chief Veterinary Officer have stated on a number of occasions
that they are able to and would develop future policies without
waiting for the end of the randomised badger culling trial. We
found that very difficult to understand.
Q42 Lynne Jones: Do you think there are
any political pressures?
Professor Bourne: I am sure there
are political pressures.
Q43 Lynne Jones: What you are saying
is they have put forward options that will make things worse,
not better; what on earth would any Government department be doing
in suggesting such a policy if it is based on sound science, or
is supposed to be?
Professor Bourne: I do not know.
There have certainly been very serious political pressures, pressures
from the NFU on the one hand with respect to badger culling and,
I am bound to say, pressures from the Select Committee as well.
If you read the reports of previous Select Committees there has
been pressure on Government with respect to badger culling and
I believe there has been all party support for badger culling,
so I sympathise somewhat with the Minister and the position he
has found himself in, but I just cannot answer your question,
it is a question you need to address to Defra.
Q44 Lynne Jones: As a new member to this
Committee I can ask such questions. It is clear to me that what
you are saying is that the most important way we need to go forward
is to improve diagnostics. Are there any other things we could
do, for example in reducing contact between badgers and cattle?
Dr Cheeseman: We have not really
touched on husbandry at all but biosecurity has been mentioned.
There is potential for improvement in farm management in order
to reduce the risks from wildlife, and although you will probably
hear the NFU later today say that these things are impractical,
I could show you some very interesting videos of badgers visiting
buildings where the farmers were completely unaware that they
were being visited by badgers. There is a need for educating the
farming community better and there is certainly a need for research
that is focused on identifying and quantifying the risks. I am
not saying it is as simple as shutting a door, but really we have
to reach out to the farming community and say, look, you do have
a responsibility to try and tackle this disease yourself. Although
I know colleagues in the NFU have said they find these things
impractical and expensive, there are some simple measures that
they could take which would reduce risks.
Professor Godfray: It is not my
brief to defend Defra, but I do have huge sympathy for the difficulties
that they have and I think it is very important to realise that
there is never going to be any one time where we have the perfect
scientific information by which we can develop policy. All the
way along it is going to be a trade-off between the quality of
the information that you have at any one time—much better
now thanks to John Bourne and his group—and the amount of
money it is costing the country. Every single time it is going
to be for Defra to make decisions based on imperfect knowledge.
If I could just briefly support what Dr Cheeseman has said, as
someone coming much more as an outsider into this field, the absolute
importance of biosecurity on farms and incentivising farmers such
that they take this very seriously will do a huge amount to help
with this problem.
Q45 Mr Drew: I am going to ask you a
scientific question, but you may see it as a political question,
and it is not in any way trying to catch you out but you talked
about cost-effectiveness, practicability and sustainability; I
want to look at the middle of those, practicability. At what level
of non-compliance would you as a scientist begin to think that
any level of badger culling becomes counter-productive? You have
talked about localised culling being something that you have got
evidence now that it could lead to increased bovine TB. If you
have these huge areas and you have significant non-compliance,
non-agreement by either farmers or wildlife trusts or A N Other
who are landowners in those areas, at what level would you as
a scientist feel very unhappy with pursuing a culling strategy?
Professor Donnelly: One of the
immediate things is that one of the additional analyses that we
did in the analysis of the randomised badger culling trial was
looking to see if the impact of proactive culling differed in
areas based on the consent level that was achieved. Over the consent
levels that we observed we did not find a significant interaction,
so we found no evidence of a systematic variation on the basis
of the consent level that was achieved. There are two things to
consider with that: one is that obviously the trial was not designed
to be powered up to find the interaction, so there could be an
interaction and we just have not detected it; the other thing
is I think it is probably very likely that the impact of non-compliance
would not just be a simple function of what proportion of the
land was non-compliant but how it was distributed, so if there
is a big patch of non-compliant land that is probably very different
than if there were lots of little patches, but I certainly do
not think that from the trial itself we could say what the threshold
was.
Professor Bourne: No, that is
right, we could only comment on what we found in trial areas and,
taking the trial overall, we had something like 89% co-operation
from farmers, 11% did not wish to co-operate at all. Of the 89%
71%, or something like that, opted for survey and cull and of
the other 18% the majority agreed to survey only and no cull,
in other words they had nothing to hide by us going onto their
farms—one suspected they just did not want their badgers
culled. If one looks forward to an application of this as a policy,
it is very likely that those percentage figures will not change
very much or, if they do, I would suspect there would be less
farmer co-operation because if farmers do not have TB—and
the majority of farmers do not—there would be concerns if
badgers were taken out that it would disturb their badgers which
they regard as disease-free and lead to them having TB breakdowns.
Inevitably, therefore, if one pursues a policy of culling there
is going to be quite an element of non-co-operation, similar to
or perhaps a little bit greater than we experienced in the trial,
but you must accept that although we had this non-co-operation
in the trial, we were still able to reduce the incidence of the
disease in cattle by 20% with the culling methods that we operated.
Q46 Mrs Moon: There is an issue over
the method of culling, and I know that there are suggestions of,
I believe, four alternatives. What is the scientific consensus
on the most appropriate and most effective method of culling and
where does that lie in terms of complying with circumvention of
European standards in terms of animal welfare?
Dr Cheeseman: There are five methods—there
is trapping, snaring, gassing, poisoning and shooting. If we take
shooting first, shooting is generally regarded as the method where
you use a high-powered lamp at night and shoot badgers in the
open. The restrictions on that are obvious: you have to have badgers
in the open and you cannot shoot them in the woodland. It is also
quite dangerous and I am sure you will be aware of some of the
tragic fatal accidents that have occurred recently. The other
type of shooting would be shooting on setts and shooting on setts
suggests that the first shot would be the last on most nights
because they would just retreat below ground and not come out
again, so I think shooting would be rather inefficient. Taking
poisoning—incidentally, chairman, I have actually over the
course of my career legitimately used all of these methods so
I do speak from some experience—we have poisoned badgers
inadvertently when we were targeting foxes in a rabies control
trial. They are very easy animals to target with poison, as was
evidenced by the fact that we poisoned a lot of badgers when we
were targeting foxes. The risks of poisoning are that you have
no control over non-target species taking the poison, and there
is also a safety issue to the operators. Gassing—we abandoned
hydrogen cyanide gassing in 1982 when it was found to be inhumane
in action, and there was also a problem of reaching the farthest
extremes of a badger's sett and achieving lethal concentrations
of gas, so badgers were surviving in the blind ends and loops
in the complex structure of a badger's sett. There is also the
issue of the porosity of soils that badgers commonly dig their
setts in, you also have an issue of safety and, again, a risk
to non-targets. With snaring, snares carry a very significant
risk in terms of the welfare of any captured animal: the longer
an animal is in a snare, the more likely it is to sustain injury.
When we operated snares the frequency of the inspections were
not more than three hours, but I do not think that is a very practical
option for a control method. There is also a significant risk
to non-target species: no matter how hard you try you will end
up sooner or later probably catching somebody's dog or a deer
or even a steer, as was the case in my experience. There is a
need for a closed season to avoid catching and removing lactating
females and leaving the cubs to starve. With trapping, you are
probably aware that some badgers are trap-shy and at best you
are going to catch 80 or 90% of badgers. The efficacy varies hugely
with the weather and the season. Traps are bulky, they are easily
targeted by animal rights activists and, again, you have to have
a closed season. None of these methods is perfect, therefore,
and all of them require a very high degree of skill in their operation.
Q47 Mrs Moon: Can I be clear, my understanding
is that poisoning is not an option that the Government is considering.
Dr Cheeseman: It was not put in
the consultation document.
Q48 Mrs Moon: You say that all of these
need a high level of skill; given the potential volume that we
are talking about here, do we have those large numbers of people
with these specific skills?
Dr Cheeseman: Defra's wildlife
unit had an enormous body of expertise in trapping and the associated
skills of surveying—you have to find the setts first—but
that is where it really ends. A few of those people did have some
experience of snaring that goes back at least a decade, but there
are not very many of them left so the answer to your question
is really no,
Q49 Mrs Moon: Thank you. What about the
culling approach contravening the Bern Convention and the European
Convention on Wildlife and Natural Habitats, what are we talking
about here?
Dr Cheeseman: We have been taken
to task under the Bern Convention before. I had to go to Strasbourg
and argue the case and it rested upon the issue of local extinction.
If any strategy achieved the extermination of a species, even
locally, it was a concern, and we managed to persuade the secretariat
that this was not going to be achieved in the randomised culling
trial. I think if it was the objective of any policy we would
have to explain to the secretariat why we were seeking to achieve
that because there is provision in the Convention for action to
be taken where there is a serious problem and obviously disease
is a serious problem. I dare say we would be back before the Bern
Convention if a culling policy were introduced that would achieve
the local extinction of badger populations.
Q50 Mrs Moon: From what has been said
earlier it is 100% that is the target, albeit the fact that you
will acknowledge that there is no chance that you would achieve
that, so it is failure rather than a lack of policy. The policy
would be 100%, but your actual success rate could never be achieved
at 100%.
Dr Cheeseman: I agree it is an
issue and it would be something that would have to be resolved.
Professor Godfray: The policy
would not be 100%, it would be to reduce badgers below a level
at which bovine TB was not sustainable in that or in other wildlife
reservoirs. It could be very low and it could risk extinction,
but the policy would not actually be 100%.
Dr Woodroffe: I would just like
to come back on Professor Godfray's point. I absolutely acknowledge
that the aim would be to reduce badger densities to such a level
that TB completely disappeared from the badger population, and
I would just like to comment that however low we have managed
to get badger populations, we have never seen the infection disappear
and, indeed, there has not been any relationship found between
the population density of badgers and the prevalence of infection
with TB.
Chairman: Fine. A quick question for
David Drew.
Q51 Mr Drew: I am intrigued, John Bourne,
to what extent Defra—either through the Minister directly
or through his officials—sought your advice on culling strategies?
If they have not sought your advice, on what basis are they able
to carry through these strategies because they have not been used
on a large scale—you could argue ever—certainly for
some considerable time?
Professor Bourne: Neither I nor
any other member of the ISG have had regular meetings with the
minister, in fact they have been very infrequent, but of course
the Minister does have senior civil servant colleagues attending
all of our ISG meetings which we hold on a monthly basis, so contact
and I assume feedback through that mechanism would be fairly complete.
With respect to the consultation paper—we were not asked
to comment on the consultation paper, but we were involved in
some of the discussions that were organised on a national basis
with stakeholders some 12 months ago on developing the consultation
document, but our input was no different to the input of other
stakeholders. We only had the opportunity, as I said earlier,
of commenting on the scientific component of the paper, the three
or four pages or whatever it was, a few days before the publication
of the consultation paper. I first saw a draft of the consultation
document on the evening of December 14—it was published,
if you recall, on December 15—and my colleagues did not
see it until it was on the website, so we played no part in drawing
up that paper and, as I have indicated, we were concerned about
the scientific interpretation. I immediately informed Defra—and
I do mean immediately—that we would need to write to ministers
and I also informed Defra that that would be in the form of an
open letter.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.
That, as always, has been fascinating, challenging, interesting
and you have given us in a relatively short space of time a great
deal of food for thought, and I am sure better informed our thinking
about the nature of the questions which Defra have posed as far
as this consultation exercise is concerned, so can I not only
thank you for coming once again and giving of your expertise and
your time, but also for your written evidence and the copies of
various presentations which I did my best to understand. I got
the general message, but this pupil could do better. Thank you
very much indeed for coming.
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