Innocent Badger

A story in today’s mirror about a letter from Lord Gardiner covering the badger cull says:

“Cull companies are not businesses which have been mandated to close … Government guidance is clear that travel for work which cannot be done from home is permitted, and routine business and disease management activities respecting hygiene and social distancing, can continue.”

He insisted the “ability to deliver safe, effective and humane culling operations is paramount”.

This is simply not true, of all the elements of the badger cull there is one that cannot be done with social distancing and that is the free shooting of badgers. The reason it can’t be done is simple, shooters have to work in teams of two and very rarely come from the same household.

This means that the freeshooting element of the badger cull will force people into sharing vehicles, furthermore those teams of shooters change very frequently, so by the end of the badger cull the majority of a zones shooters could have Corona virus, some may even die.

Lord Gardiner probably couldn’t care less, he’s a notorious fox hunter, who was chairman of the Kimblewick hunt for many years. He mentions it along with the Countryside Alliance in his list of interests:

This particular hunt has been in the national press a couple of times in the last few years, many following the badger cull will remember the Kimblewick having to kill many of it’s hounds after they contracted bTB, no doubt spreading the disease across the country.

Last year two of the hunts members were caught releasing a trapped fox to hounds.

The district judge, Kamlesh Rana, said the fox was “trapped in the earth and was faced with drainage rods at one end and humans at the other” and that the defendants’ actions were “deliberate and premediated”. However, she recognised during their sentencing that they “were not the brains of the operation”.

You have to wonder who was?