Ireland’s badger cull is mostly killing individuals uninfected by bovine tuberculosis (bTB), The Journal has reported. The publication said post-mortem tests of slain badgers over the last five years reveal that over 80% of them were not infected with bTB. The findings have led to increased pressure on the Irish government to end the slaughter.
Ireland’s bTB policy includes badger culling, badger vaccination, and cow-focused measures, such as a testing regime. England’s policy contains similar measures, although its badger vaccination efforts are currently minimal. However, there are differences between the bTB policies in these nations. For instance, Ireland effectively uses snares to trap badgers in its cull and vaccination operations. These are highly controversial due to the harm they can cause to badgers and other non-target animals, both wild and domesticated.
If The Journal‘s exposé is anything to go by, the dissimilarities also include that Ireland runs post-mortem tests on killed badgers to a much greater extent than England does. The bTB policy guidance in England does NOT require slaughtered badgers to be routinely examined in most cull areas, which means the overwhelming majority of them are not subject to post-mortem bTB tests.
Thousands of badgers tested
According to The Journal, Ireland tested over 10,000 slaughtered badgers for bTB across the last five years. The publication doesn’t highlight how many badgers were killed during those same years in total. However it does point out that the Department of Agriculture, Food and Marine (DAFM) killed 7,319 badgers in 2024. This was the “the highest number recorded in the last 10 years,” it said.
Other sources indicate that Ireland typically kills 5,000-6,000 badgers in its cull annually. So, it has presumably slaughtered between 25,000-30,000 badgers across the last five years, perhaps slightly more due to its record-breaking 2024. This means that the country has run post-mortem tests on around a third of all killed badgers across those years.
As The Journal highlighted, no mycobacterium bovis (M. bovis) was found in 8,211 of the dead badgers during post-mortem tests, which is the bacteria that can cause bTB. In other words, over 80% of the badgers were free of the disease that they were killed in connection to.
Cull ‘totally ineffective’
In comments to The Journal, rescue coordinator at Kildare Wildlife Rescue, Pearse Stokes, described the cull policy as “totally ineffective,” and highlighted that it is “killing most of our badgers that are completely innocent and uninfected.” Meanwhile, DAFM defended the culling policy, arguing that its research has shown a “wildlife strategy” – including culling – to be a necessary part of efforts to tackle bTB.
In the wake of these revelations, the Irish government has come under increasing pressure to end the cull, a pledge officials have made previously. In a parliamentary debate on 21 May to mark National Biodiversity Week, a TD (MP) from the People Before Profit party, Paul Murphy, called on the government to commit to ending “the irrational, state-sanctioned cruelty and biodiversity destruction,” The Journal reported.
Irrational cruelty
Many people want UK officials to end the badger cull in England too. For years, officials have claimed they will phase out or end the slaughter. But none of them have actually done so. This includes the present government, which came to power pledging an end to the “ineffective” cull. Yet, it has since put an entirely meaningless deadline on the slaughter, vowing to stop the cull by the end of this parliament in 2029.
In practice, this means the government has effectively let itself off the hook for having to end the cull, particularly if it does not get re-elected at the next general election.
England’s massacre of badgers is just as irrational as Ireland’s – arguably more so, considering the extremely high death toll. Already, the number of badgers killed in England since the cull began in 2013 is around a quarter of a million. Ireland has killed around 66,000 badgers across the last ten years, as Murphy highlighted in the National Biodiversity Week debate. However, it’s important to note that Ireland’s total badger population is significantly lower than England’s, according to estimates.
During the session, Murphy highlighted that scientific research has shown the English cull to have no significant impact on bTB rates in cows. Similarly, the Save Me Trust has investigated how M. bovis spreads among cows in an on-farm case study. Its findings were spotlighted in the documentary Brian May – The Badgers, the Farmers, and Me. Like the scientific research, the organisation found that the answer to tackling bTB lies in measures focused on cows – like better slurry management and robust bTB testing – not killing badgers.
Low bTB rates
Due to routine post-mortem examinations not being required under England’s bTB policy, very few of the badgers it has killed have been tested for the disease.
However, university-led examinations of badgers ‘found dead’, such as individuals killed on roads, have pointed to low rates of bTB in badgers. These surveys occurred in parts of the country where cows are considered to be at medium risk of contracting the disease, formally known as the edge area. The survey reports were completed in 2018, but officials failed to publicly disclose the findings for two years, with the results finally coming to light in late 2020.
Some limited post-mortems have occured within the bTB policy too. As the Badger Trust has highlighted, over 102,000 badgers were killed between 2013 and 2019. Of these, a mere 900 or so were subject to post-mortem testing, meaning that less than 1% of killed badgers were tested for bTB. Regarding the post-mortem findings, the Trust highlighted:
“Of this number less than 5% were found to have bovine TB to a degree where they posed a risk of infecting other badgers or possibly cattle.”
Areas that are considered at low risk of bTB, yet have suffered outbreaks of unknown origin in herds, are the general exception when it comes to post-mortems. Cows and wildlife (badgers and deer) are subject to “enhanced surveillance” in these places, which are formally known as hotspot areas. Surveillance measures include post-mortem testing of some killed and found dead badgers.
End the carnage
The Labour government has confirmed that it will continue the policy of not routinely doing post-mortems on killed badgers in most cull areas. Nonetheless, it has promised to develop a “national wildlife surveillance programme” as part of its TB eradication strategy. The government says that this will offer an “up-to-date understanding of disease in badgers.”
Understandably, many people are enraged by the idea of tens or hundreds of thousands of badgers being killed for a disease they do not even have. But to an extent, bTB rates in badger populations are irrelevant. In the bTB debate, what matters is whether infected badgers are transmitting the disease to cows in any meaningful way and, crucially, whether tackling the disease in cows is possible without addressing the disease in badgers.
As research by conservation ecologist Tom Langton and others has highlighted, there is vanishingly little evidence of an association between badger culling and bTB rates in cows, which suggests the wild animals do not play a key role in transmitting the disease to cows. On the other hand, the study that Murphy seemingly highlighted in the Irish debate determined that cow-focused measures introduced in England as part of bTB policy is the likely driving factor in lowering disease rates. This indicates that cow-to-cow transmission is the source of disease spread that truly matters.
Moreover, a 2018 government review highlighted that there is “no scientific consensus” that bTB exists in badgers in a way that makes it essential to address the disease in their populations in order to stamp it out in cows. This aligns with the Save Me Trust’s findings. As the organisation’s CEO, Anne Brummer, explained:
“Our research demonstrates that it’s possible to manage bovine TB within your herd without worrying about an infected badger population.”
