The practice was widely used in farming to control the spread of bovine tuberculosis (TB), which resulted in the slaughter of more than 270,000 cattle in the last 10 years, according to government figures.
The last badger culling licence, which was granted in Cumbria in 2024, expires in 2028, but the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said it was subject to an annual authorisation from Natural England, which would not be renewed.
The Badger Trust said the move was “good news for badgers” as culling was not an effective way to tackle bovine TB.
Thankfully there seems to be a move towards the obvious, which is a vaccination program. Last time I looked into it, vaccination was “impossible” because it would create a false positive on the type of test they used.
