It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Wilson. I congratulate the hon. Member for High Peak (Ruth George) on securing this important debate and the measured manner in which she spoke.
I take issue with the idea that there is a battle between badger welfare and culling. I have told numerous people this, and many of them laugh, but I am probably the only person in this Chamber who has had one pet badger, and I am definitely the only person in the Chamber who has had two pet badgers. I am very pro-badger. I am pro-healthy badgers. Ever since I began working on this, when I was the junior shadow agriculture spokesman, I have set in train, I hope, a series of policies to ensure that we have healthy wildlife living alongside healthy cattle.
There is not a single country in the world that I have visited—whether the problem is white-tailed deer in Michigan, wild feral cattle in Australia, the brushtail possum in New Zealand, or, in particular, the badger in the Republic of Ireland—where there is a reservoir of disease in wildlife that has not been tackled at the same time as it has been tackled in cattle. It is so obvious, and it has worked; when we had a bipartisan approach in the 1960s and 1970s, we got the disease down to 0.01%.
It is absolutely tragic that we threw that away, and it has caused great misery. The hon. Lady was right to highlight the hideous cruelty of shooting a pregnant cow, so that the calf suffocates, which is rarely mentioned. The Badger Trust always shows beautiful black-and-white photographs of badgers, like my dear old badgers—never a revolting picture of a diseased badger in the last stages of TB, covered in lesions, driven out of the sett, covered in bites and dying a horrible, long, lingering death.
There is also a human element. My hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (James Gray) mentioned the mental trauma of being tested—the sheer trauma for farmers, the tension, the nightmare of waiting to see whether they will fail the test—and the physical danger. I am afraid that one of my constituents was killed while doing a TB test, when a young bull threw his head up and smashed my constituent against the crush.
All that is completely unnecessary if we can get rid of the disease in cattle and in wildlife, but we have to address both together. It is not either/or. We cannot go on with the expense: we are spending £1 billion on a disease that has been eradicated in other countries. The Germans take out 70,000 badgers a year. We can look at what New Zealand has done on the brushtail possum. My question is this: can we please acknowledge that this is working?
I was in charge of introducing the first two trial culls. We had intense saboteur activity, with hunt saboteurs coming from all over the United Kingdom, some of them with convictions for violent offences. I pay tribute to the farmers who, with incredible bravery, got those first culls going in Somerset and Gloucestershire. The Downs report shows a reduction of 66% in the cull area in Gloucestershire, where we had intense activity—we had saboteurs camping out on badger setts—and 36% in Somerset, where I went to a public meeting about 18 months ago to discuss what could be done on floods, and I had people coming up to me almost in tears, saying, “Mr Paterson, I just want to say thank you. We’d been closed up since my grandfather—for 40 years we’d been closed up. We’ve gone clear.”
My last point is to ask whether we can look at the basic reproduction number of this disease. Can we look at the level where the disease peters out, when we get the badger population low enough to have a healthy population? I would like the Minister to look at the basic reproductive ratio, R0, which represents the number of cases that one case generates on average over the course of its infectious period, in an otherwise uninfected population. Could we make it the target of our policy to get the disease down to a level where it is not sustainable in the wildlife population and end this hideous trauma for wildlife, cattle and our farmers?
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