I beg to move,
That this House has considered Badger culling and bovine TB.
Bovine tuberculosis—bTB—is a disease affecting beef and dairy cattle herds in England and Wales. Scotland is officially free of the disease and Wales is increasingly considered to be bringing the disease under control, but its incidence is rising in England.
Bovine tuberculosis is caused by the organism Mycobacterium bovis, which is excreted by infected cattle on to the land they graze where it survives in the soil. It can be and is then passed to other cattle and other species, including badgers, rats, cats, deer, foxes, moles, hedgehogs, worms and, I understand, even flies. However, the predominant mode of transmission in cattle is nose to nose and of course through trading, which promotes it between herds.
In recent years, the disease has spread extensively northwards and eastwards from the areas of original prevalence in the south-west of England, and that spread continues. In fact, the number of new herd breakdowns appears to double approximately every nine years, and in the last decade alone the UK Government has slaughtered 314,000 otherwise healthy cattle in an attempt to control the disease.