Derbyshire Wildlife Trust is urging people to contact their MPs in a bid to get them to vote against the badger cull

MPs will be debating whether the Government’s culling policy should continue. It comes after it was recently reported that findings from the Independent Expert Panel - set up to monitor the effectiveness, humaneness and safety of the pilot culls in Somerset and Gloucestershire – would show that a wider roll-out of the policy would be unacceptable. Whilst the panels report has not yet been published, it is understood that the number of badgers shot fell well short of the target deemed necessary and that more than five per cent of badgers took longer than five minutes to die, failing the humaneness test, said a spokesman for the Trust, based in Belper.

The cull was part of the Government’s strategy to combat the devastating problem of bovine Tuberculosis (bovine TB).

The Wildlife Trusts continue to urge the Government to drop badger culling from its bovine TB strategy and prioritise badger vaccination, alongside a comprehensive package of cattle measures: better biosecurity, stricter movement controls, improved TB testing and development of a cattle vaccine.

Derbyshire Wildlife Trust has been fundraising for a badger vaccination programme, which will begin this May in Derbyshire. The Trust has already achieved its original target of £50,000 and is continuing to appeal for support to enable it to vaccinate more badgers in the county.

Conservation Manager Tim Birch is co-ordinating the Trust’s vaccination programme. He said: “The fact that we have had so much support for our vaccination programme shows that people are keen to find another solution to bovine TB. We would urge everyone who cares about wildlife to contact their MP, ask them to attend Thursday’s debate and to vote against the cull.”