'Brexit was supposed to save the badgers - instead we're killing more than ever'
If a problem costs you £120million a year, every year, and the solution would cost a tenth of that just the once, it shouldn't take a former Goldman Sachs finance nerd to work out that fixing it would be best.
It takes a very special sort of brain to decide that, no, actually the best thing to do is to locate that cheap solution, sit outside its house until the wee hours, and then shoot it in the face until it is very, very dead.
That is exactly what Rishi Sunak, economic wunderkind of this parish, has done to badgers. Specifically, he's done it to the safest, healthiest badgers we've ever had, on the grounds they're all diseased.
"Look, I don't understand it either. Run that by me again?" (PA)Bovine tuberculosis is a pernicious little bug, but most cattle with it don't suffer or die as a result. Even the milk isn't harmful, so long as it's pasteurised. When the first outbreaks occurred in the early 1900s, milk was served raw, humans got infected, and badgers were a convenient scapegoat. They were gassed with hydrogen cyanide in their setts.
Today, TB infection can stop the meat being exported to the EU, so successive governments have decided to shoot any cow that tests positive for the disease, which in big outbreaks has led to huge and unsightly barbecues.
'UK's most neglected street with post-apocalyptic scenes like The Last of Us'
Badgers, domestic cats, deer and plenty of other animals can spread TB. But one of the biggest spreaders is man, for three simple reasons:
1. He moves cows around the country all the time. 2. He doesn't fence them in properly. 3. He hasn't bothered to invent a decent TB test, so entire herds get wiped out in one go just to be on the safe side. Tens of thousands of cows cop it as a result, despite being perfectly healthy. All this costs money, and can be avoided if you vaccinate badgers, cows, or both.
"Not needles! MOOOOO!" (Getty Images)Read more similar news:
Comments:
comments powered by Disqus
