Blatant misinformation for an animal description

[tigris115]

So a friend of mine informed me of something that wasn't right with one of the animal facts in the Zoopedia for the European badger

This is controversial but it's been found that the infamous connection between badgers and TB in cattle is pretty low and statistically insignificant

There was even a scientific paper published about this

The reason I care is because I feel that a lot of UK species are unfairly maligned and even something like this can add to the pressure for unscientific animal management

If you want more information on badgers in England, that same friend of mine linked me this website

 

[markun]

I think it’s important that this is raised with frontier. It might also be worth letting this organisation know about it

https://www.badgertrust.org.uk/

 

[RightWhale]

So a friend of mine informed me of something that wasn't right with one of the animal facts in the Zoopedia for the European badger
View attachment 396249

This is controversial but it's been found that the infamous connection between badgers and TB in cattle is pretty low and statistically insignificant

There was even a scientific paper published about this
View attachment 396247

The reason I care is because I feel that a lot of UK species are unfairly maligned and even something like this can add to the pressure for unscientific animal management

If you want more information on badgers in England, that same friend of mine linked me this website

You know what’s funny? In Vet school we learned how some badgers carry TB. But I didn’t know it was so statistically low. The most realistic thing is it’s probably like any carnivore/predator we have in the states, farmers feel threatened by them and want to find ways to be rid of them.

 

[Cocolori]

It's been a while since I looked into this but I think there are studies on either side. What seemed to be true a few years ago when I did a review is that culling is not as effective as cattle vaccination and whilst usually cheaper it can sometimes be more expensive when you factor in the security needed against animal rights protesters. It is possible that in some circumstances culling is an appropriate option but it seems to be highly dependent on a number of very complex factors. One of th primary issues is that culling can cause distrubance in social herarchies and precipitate badgers moving to new areas so outside a cull area tb goes up whilst in the cull zone it goes down. cattle to cattle transmission accounts for the majority of cases and better farm biosecurity is responsible for the biggest reductions.

In fact the biggest issue in government policy is that it's not that farmers were unwilling to vaccinate (as they do in other countries) but that the tests we use in the UK will often show a false positive for vaccinated cattle - ironically how regulated the testing and controls are (a legacy of BSE) was contributing to us not being able to use the most obvious and cost effective means of eliminating the disease in our livestock. Not sure if that has changed now - I believe tests were in development and getting cheaper that could distinguish vaccinated versus positive.