KEY POINTS:
Tens of thousands of Britain's badgers face death in an unprecedented official cull.
The move, which is bound to create a public outcry, would defy official recommendations from a 10-year study that the much-loved mammals should be spared.
But the cabinet minister responsible believes it cannot legally be stopped.
Farmers, landowners and vets are drawing up detailed plans for a mass extermination of badgers over a vast area of the West Country in a bid to control tuberculosis infections in cattle.
They hope to start killing the animals in about June, and plan to repeat the operation annually for three years.
Representatives of 14 agricultural and veterinary organisations met two weeks ago and agreed to start culling badgers, which has been effectively banned for nearly 10 years.
And cattle farmers over a broad swathe of Devon and Cornwall are preparing an application to kill as many as possible to try to control the spread of tuberculosis in their herds.
The proposed cull area includes Britain's best-known badgers, on the Fishleigh Estate near Okehampton, whose antics have delighted millions on BBC2's Springwatch.
The plan defies the conclusions of the official Independent Scientific Group on Cattle TB headed by Professor John Bourne, which concluded that killing badgers "cannot meaningfully contribute" to controlling the disease and might even increase its spread.
The Government has yet to decide whether to allow culling, and the Secretary of State for Environment, Hilary Benn, says he has yet to make up his mind.
But the farming and animal health minister, Lord Rooker, is giving it his tacit backing, and believes that, in any case, the Government has "no justification" to reject it.
The National Farmers' Union told the Independent on Sunday yesterday that the plans for the mass cull were being drawn up because "it is the only thing that the Government seems to be prepared to agree to. It appears to be the only game in town."
Bovine TB and the badger population are increasing rapidly. Infections from the disease are doubling every 4 1/2 years and the number of confirmed incidents has jumped from 125 in 1994 to about 2000 last year.
No one knows how many badgers there are, but by some estimates, their numbers have doubled to 400,000 nationwide since 1990.
Even their strongest defenders admit that badgers act as a reservoir for the disease, getting it from cattle and re-infecting them. But there is huge public opposition to reducing the badger population.
An official consultation last year drew 47,000 responses - three times as many as a similar one on foxhunting - and more than 95 per cent were against the slaughter.
High-profile conservationist are split on the issue. Prince Charles, whose Highgrove farm is in a TB hotspot, has pushed for the cull, but Sir David Attenborough strongly opposes it.
From the mid-1970s, individual farmers were given licences to kill badgers on their land to try to stop them infecting their cattle, but this stopped in 1998 while the Government carried out trials on whether it worked. The trials, over 103sq km, killed 12,000 badgers, but last June Professor Bourne's inquiry - which was set up to assess this cull - concluded that it sometimes made the problem worse.
This was because diseased badgers fled the culling to infect new areas of the countryside, and uninfected ones were drawn into the cull areas to replace those slaughtered, only to pick up TB themselves.
Ministers, surprised by the report's conclusions, asked the Government's chief scientist, Sir David King, to convene a panel of experts, which after meeting for a day and a half, and without talking to Professor Bourne's group, said that culling could work.
It picked up a paragraph in the report which said culling "might be more effective" if carried out over a larger area with boundaries such as the sea, rivers and motorways that badgers would not cross.
Professor Bourne attacked Sir David's conclusions as "very superficial" and "very selective", but this is what is now being planned in Devon and Cornwall in an area bound by the sea, the A30 trunk road, and the Rivers Camel and Torridge.
The National Farmers' Union and the National Beef Association have now contacted every sizeable farm in the area and persuaded 70 per cent of the farmers to take part in what would be the first slaughter on such a scale. They would aim to kill every badger they could in a series of annual culls between this year and 2011, when they hope a vaccine would become available.
They accept that they will have to "do the dirty work" themselves and pay for the killing, as the Government is refusing to finance it.
Ministers have said that no decision will be made on the scheme until after an inquiry by a House of Commons select committee has reported early in the new year.
But Lord Rooker points out that a clause in the Badgers Act, which otherwise gives them rigorous protection, says licences to cull them to prevent the spread of disease cannot reasonably be refused.
He believes any decision to stop a cull could be overturned in court.
- INDEPENDENT
