A badger cub being released after vaccination.
Photo by Seth Jackson.

By Rosie Woodroffe, Kelly Astley, Rose Barnecut, Peter N. M. Brotherton, Christl A. Donnelly, Henry Grub, Cally Ham, Caroline Howe, Chris Jones, Cheryl Marriott, Verity Miles, Marcus Rowcliffe, Tom Shelley, and Keith Truscott.

Read the full paper here.

Control of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) is the UK’s greatest animal health challenge and also its greatest wildlife controversy. Each year, bTB causes misery to thousands of UK cattle farmers, but eradicating the disease from their cattle is difficult, in part because wild badgers can also become infected, and transmit the infection back to cattle. Over the past decade, the UK government took the drastic step of authorising badger culls across more than 30,000square kilometres, prompting public controversy and even protest from wildlife groups. In Cornwall, a dozen farmers decided to take a different approach, and asked local conservationists to help them deliver badger vaccination instead of culling.

Wildlife scientists took blood samples from many of the vaccinated badgers and showed that the proportion testing positive for bTB declined from 16% at the start of vaccination, to 0% in the fourth year, suggesting that vaccination was protecting badgers and might thus reduce transmission to local cattle. Social scientists then interviewed the farmers who had taken part in the vaccination program. The social scientists found that these farmers were very enthusiastic about the scheme, considering it a great success.

On its own, the project is too small-scale to judge the contribution that badger vaccination might make to bTB control nationally, but it does show that the approach is promising and should be evaluated at larger scales. We identified leadership by farmers, combined with scientific monitoring, as central to the success of this pilot project.