In the coliseum of life, it is the badgers who are about to die and must salute you. Well, I say badgers. What I mean is the badgers and the bees, and the birds and the insects, and the fish and the worms and the plants. It’s any animal that won’t be put into a Prada outfit, or trained to make money or eaten for your pleasure. If they inconvenience us, we’ll lop off their heads, poison them outright and turn their habitat into paper. They’re not like us. They must be worth less than us, we’ll do what we like.
This time, the badgers are going to be saved. It wasn’t because the death of 100,000 badgers ONLY MIGHT have reduced the level of tuberculosis in cattle by a flavourless 15% over nine years, and that’s a bit pointless. It wasn’t because cattle more frequently catch TB from other cattle. It wasn’t because badger culling trials actually found that the slaughter of badgers meant any surviving badgers from the cull area would up-sticks and move quickly away; spreading any TB they might carry further and faster to our farms. It was because we discovered it was economically bonkers. In fact, the official line from independent scientists was, “badger culling has positive and negative effects on bovine TB in cattle and is difficult, costly and controversial.” Very costly, in fact. Either £200 or £2,500 per hectare depending on whether you bother trying to kill them humanely or not. (£2,500 is also how much it would cost to vaccinate the badgers per hectare, incidentally).
The problem is that TB kills cows, badgers sometimes carry TB, and we can’t vaccinate the cows. It’s also difficult to improve bio-security on farms, costing about £4000 per farm to keep the badgers out. So, it’s a head scratcher. I can see the tax payer and/or farmer payer might not be thrilled to dish out £4000 per farm, or £2,500 to vaccinate badgers (although they manage it in Wales), and of course, the farmer’s profits are important.
But believe it or not, members of the superior species, human profit is not the only thing with any worth, and we’re saving the badgers’ hairy little souls for the wrong reasons. We actually share this earth with the animals that struggle through the cold and hunger, the motorways and the pesticides, and just because they can’t talk, walk or play GTA doesn’t make them pointless.
Let me put it another way. Chairman Mao decided in 1958 that he didn’t like sparrows, and told the Chinese people it was their duty to kill them all. Without the sparrows to eat the bugs and locusts of China, their populations swarmed. Along with deforestation and the misuse of poisons and pesticides, the ecological imbalance created is credited with “exacerbating the Great Chinese Famine in which upwards of 30 million people died of starvation.” We live on this earth, with all its badgers and sparrows, birds, bees, trees and fish, and if we are so very superior, we should really learn to have a bit of respect. That’s all I’m saying.