http://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/blog/2010/02/10/new-report-casts-doubt-on-cost-effectiveness-of-badger-cull/ Advancing ecology and making it count Tue, 14 May 2013 07:10:58 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 http://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/blog/2010/02/10/new-report-casts-doubt-on-cost-effectiveness-of-badger-cull/#comment-1459 John A W Lock Tue, 11 Jan 2011 19:50:18 +0000 http://britishecologicalsociety.org/blog/?p=865#comment-1459 Although to the majority of the public four years may not seem like a very long time before you have to repeat the control process, to the dairy farmer it represents a substantial rebate. After all to avoid perennial problems such as mastitis (which removes more animals than ever bTB does) they have to carry out preventative procedures on a twice-daily basis, at which point once every four years doesn’t look so bad. The same situation apples with vermin in grain stores etc: you have to keep on repeating the procedures year after year after year. There’s no magic bullet that cleans out rodents or insects forever so it’s hard to understand why we should expect to find one with a persistent pathogen like bTB. After all we’ve been trying to eliminate the human form for decades…

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