Badgers and Govt "scientists"

Despite being vegetarian and broadly in favour of animal welfare attempts and being opposed to cruelty and unnecessary slaughter of animals, I've always been slightly ambivalent about badger culls and similar. When the reports earlier in the year indicated what we'd always suspected, that it didn't actually make a difference to the spread of bovine TB, I thought that might possibly be the end of it. It appears not.

My parents get The Telegraph. They used to get the Independent, but then I moved out and it went tabloid, plus Alex is in the Telegraph (or at least was). This mornings picture story is this: Cull badgers to fight TB, advises top scientist, and it's followd up by a comment peice on page two using that failure of a good argument, the appeal that Common sense demands badger cull. Fortunately, I have tyrell paying attention, and he's done a nice little demolition job on the idiocy surrounding the story and the wonderful idea that a Govt advisor (specialty: chemistry) can spend a few months and thus dismiss a report by a professor of animal health, director of the institute of animal health and a study that took him ten years to complete.

Now, obviously, I might be missing something and I haven't had time to do much research, but, um, who would you believe? Oh, wait, it's DEFRA, they'll go with not-annoying-the-farmers approach rather than the slightly harder let's-tell-the-farmers-the-truth approach. Gah!