Daily Archives: Mon, 22 October, 2007

Why do some farmers hate Badgers?

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Badgers are always the first up against the wall when there’s a hint of TB in cattle. The BBC reported today that “Science chief urges badger cull.”

This is despite there being plenty of evidence that killing badgers doesn’t even stop the spread of TB in cattle.

The most recent study by the Independent Scientific Group, published in June, also suggested badgers played a role in the spread of bTB, but warned that culling would have to be so extensive it would be uneconomical.
Meanwhile, conservation groups, including the Badger Trust, argue the disease can be contained by improving the cattle-testing regime and introducing tighter restrictions on cattle movements.
(Source: Another BBC post)

Killing badgers is not popular. In 2006, 96% of 47,000 people who responded to a government consultation were against it. Yet another pointless waste of money on a public consultation that is going to be ignored, then?

As the British Badger Trust says:

The badger is one of Britain’s best loved and iconic animals and as such is part of our National Heritage. They are a poignant symbol of the British countryside and a protected species.

A “protected species”, note.

In case, you assume that Britain is awash with wild mammals, especially badgers, it isn’t. The English countryside bears the scars of decades of agribiz and can barely furnish up a half-eaten water-vole for your environmental pleasure. The badger is one of the few surviving wild mammals of any size.

Barely anyone has ever seen a badger, outside of children’s book illustrations. There are a handful of badger refuges where you can watch them from a hide. I have seen a road-killed badger up close. Once. In almost the only area of England that is neither developed nor mountainous. (Probably not for long.)

Badgers are not just threatened by farmers who have somehow come to believe that their cattle can catch badger diseases.

There is also a “sport” (I use the term ironically) called badger baiting (the clue’s in the name) which involves sending dogs into badger setts and killing them. This is understandably illegal. Badger Watch has a News section that consists of recent prosecutions. So, how is it not criminal to consider gassing hundreds of badgers. Even the repellent humans who kill them for sport don’t kill more than one or two at a time. The cull is aimed at most of the findable badger population.

This isn’t a problem because badgers are really cute (although they are.) It’s a problem because it’s yet another misguided assault on an increasingly fragile ecosystem, driven by short-term economic goals, at a time when we are all supposed to be coming to recognise the interdependence of life in our increasingly fragile eco-systems.

There is an online parliamentary e-petition against culling. Please sign it if you live in the UK and you don’t support culling and you can bring yourself to believe there’s any point.

Was it something we said?

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Our ranting has become notably less authoritative recently. (Odd, as I feel at least as authoritative as I have ever been. i.e. not at all.) And consistently less visible.

Maybe somebody has an explanation. The whole blogternet can’t have (slightly) broken, can it?

  • A week or so ago, I tried to post a comment on a student post on Pharyngula – to be told repeatedly, in the face of the evidence – that I needed to have a name and an email address. Checked. Yes they were definitely there. I copied and pasted. I rewrote them several times.

    The helpful message (I paraphrase here, and use leaden sarcasm while I’m doing it) said I was probably being blocked as spam, but that I could try enabling javascript or cookies or allowing/ deleting the science-blog cookies. Tried them all. My comment stayed unposted. It wasn’t a great loss to twenty-first century thought, to be honest. Still…

  • This blog has been leaking Technorati “authority” like an authority-leaking sieve. Over the past month, we’ve been dropping a few links a day, according to Technorati.

    One day, it was something like 40 down today from the previous day. I’m pretty certain I would have noticed three months ago, if the blog had suddenly accumulated 40 links in one day, . So how could we lose them all in one day?

    Oddly, firestats and feedburner show that blog hits are much higher than they were when we had twice the “authority”, three months ago.

  • We’ve been intermittently vanishing from the Atheist blogroll over the past few weeks. This now seems to have become a permanent affliction. I hovered over the blog’s name on an Atheist blogroll site that has a static list. It said the the last post was on Friday at 12:38. Well, no. There have been a good few posts since then.
  • When the blog has appeared on the blog roll, over the past few weeks, it has taken at least an hour to appear. If the posts are queued somewhere for an hour, where is that please? Because it doesn’t seem apply to other posts that just appear after they are posted.

    When we’ve looked at the time stamps of blogs that appear long before ours, we find they’ve been written later. And magically appeared without falling into some warp dimension on the way. Maybe it’s crossing the Atlantic then? No, that doesn’t work either. There are UK-based blogs that pop up seemingly almost as soon as they are posted.

    We were even testing an ongoing hypothesis that the blogroll would only display this blog name when there were another more recent three blogs to put ahead of it. We never managed to falsify this.

    However, being ungrateful at being consistently fourth started to seem a bit churlish when we vanished completely.

    • TW has tried pinging the blogroll, in various ways, without any effect. Pinging Technorati seems to have an effect, in that Technorati will usually list a post within a few minutes of a ping. Or even respond to the auto-ping function and find the blog posts, all by itself.

As a side-effect, an increasing proportion of visitors are coming directly from search engines. There is a fair amount of entertainment value in working out how some of these searches would have led to here, unless every other blog in the known world had already been taken straight to heaven in the Rapture.

Anyone with any ideas about what’s going on?