13/06/2026
I feel for this hedgehog. A small snack for someone higher up the food chain, but our Politicians can't see their plight. It's easier to blame farmers than to continue to tackle predators.
Humans are at the top of the food chain, and keep disrupting the food chain below us to fit politicians' whims.
Re-wilding only brings predators back. Stopping fox hunting does the same, as does stopping the badger cull What measures can we introduce to protect the hedgehog etc? That is the question that is never answered even though a lot of the electorate would support measures to help birds and hedgehogs.
What can we do if we keep the food chain as it is, to help the little guys?
In the nothing burger which is the new bTB Control Strategy being imposed on us, two paragraphs caught our eye.
"APHA simulations predict that, when delivered in the wake of recent culling, vaccination should allow populations to recover while continuing to reduce the number of infected badgers."
What?? It goes against everything we've worked for since 2013 to 'allow populations to recover'. The whole point of these culls was to reduce badger numbers to reduce the stress on individuals which triggers full blown TB. To quote our post of May 31st - 'if the badger becomes stressed or malnourished... the fibrous walls of the granuloma dissolve. The necrotic core breaks down, turning a previously contained infection into an active transmissible disease.' Rather than allowing badger numbers to rise again while jabbing whichever random ones you can trap with an expensive and creaky old vaccine which is useless on already infected animals, we should be encouraging a licensed maintenance cull as in Germany, and only then will we ever achieve a sustainable population of increasingly healthy badgers. At a fraction of the cost of vaccination.
And then there's
"With most of the HR areas having received at least four years of culling, a transition to vaccination offers the opportunity to continue forcing TB levels down, while reducing environmental and welfare impacts."
Sadly the BCG is highly unlikely to do any 'forcing' of TB levels, certainly not downwards.
And as for the 'environmental and welfare impacts', from the viewpoint of our hedgehogs, bumble bees and ground nesting birds, these impacts have only been entirely positive.
