Culling badgers is very likely to spread bTb to previously uninfected areas.
To truly tackle bTB and other diseases like mastitis, we need to detensify cattle farming and stop pushing animals to the very limit.
Badgers under attack will run beyond their territory and if that happens, we could end up with a far bigger bTb problem on our hands than ever before.
My own observation is that bTb hot-spots tend to be in areas where you have dairy farms with ever increasing intensification of cattle.
I have firsthand experience of bTB, I know the immense emotional and financial havoc that it brings to hard-working, hard-pressed farmers and I understand how desperate they are to see something done to make it go away.
The government and the National Farmers Union would have people believe that the only solution to controlling the devastating scourge of bTb, is to kill thousands of badgers.
This conveniently ignores the fact that, in the same time period, Northern Ireland achieved comparable results in reducing bTB by cattle-based measures and without a single badger being killed.
Even a total eradication of badgers will not end bTB (bovine tuberculosis), for one simple reason: almost every other animal in the British countryside is a vector of the disease.
Meurig Raymond, the NFU president, said: "Farmers facing a daily battle against bTB in those areas that have been granted licences for badger control operations this year will welcome the news that finally action is being taken to tackle the reservoir of disease in wildlife in these areas.
It's inevitable that farmers who see badgers in their fields will perceive them as the cause of bTB in their cattle, but badgers with TB don't clasp bloody hankies to their faces like actors in period dramas; the disease is generally not visible, and infection rates are very low.
Based on the use of current skin tests for TB, developed in the 1930s, for every 100 cows infected with bTB the test will, on average, miss 20, leaving large numbers of cattle in herds spreading a disease that badgers are being blamed for.
