July

Recently a new study was published in Vet Record about badger culling and its relationship with the incidence of bovine tuberculosis (bTB). It was very quickly covered by the news and declared a “landmark study”, with the authors concluding that there is no detectable link between badger culling and any decline in incidence of bTB. However, Defra promptly issued a rebuttal and discounted the study as “methodologically flawed”.

The earth we live on is an intricately engineered, delicately balanced life-support system. Be it a worm, a tree, a mole, or a bee; a cloud, a teaspoon of soil, or the sea – almost anything in the environment that you can name (even the common wasp) is part of our life-support machine.