Friday, September 21, 2012

My gaff, my rules

I don't know if badgers carry or pass tuberculosis onto cattle, farmers say they do and want to have a cull of them. My general opinion is that it's their land so long as they aren't breaking the law it's their business...
sadly farmers have to put up with enviroloons who believe what farmers do is actually their business.
Telegraph.
Humane Society International and Care for the Wild claim consumers do not want not want to pay a premium for organic products from farms that are shooting badgers.
But the Soil Association insist that it is up to farmers if they want to carry out legal pest control on their farms.
The Government has issued a licence for farmers to kill thousands of badgers in West Gloucestershire and is expected to announce the go-ahead for a cull in West Somerset shortly.
MInisters claim the two trial culls will stop the spread of the cattle disease bovine tuberculosis, that is carried by badgers.
Mark Jones, the Executive Director of the Humane Society, said people who buy organic food love wildlife and do not want dairy products from farms taking part in the cull.
I suspect that a lot of people who don't buy over priced bug ridden produce organic food also love wildlife too and by some strange chance would not appreciate coming down with tuberculosis come to that.
But we're talking about a group of people who clearly know what is best for us and have taken it into their heads that killing what farmers consider to be vermin on their own land constitutes the removal of the word 'organic' from any (presumably milk) that they produce, not that I expect a lot of hard pressed financially families will be buying anything organic unless it's cheaper than mass produced stuff. What we are looking at is a niche market, unfortunately what we're also looking at is unreasonable people and farmers have been threatened and intimidated by 'extremists' for starting the cull. Extremist seeming to mean 'average' when dealing with enviroloons as they have a predilection to attack people in support of their endless campaign to make us all dirt poor medievalists.
Personally if I were a farmer I wouldn't give a damn if my product said organic or not, the supermarkets will still buy the stuff.
As it should be...

3 annotations:

JuliaM said...

Rabid animal rights activists try to piss off the organic bridgade?

*gets popcorn*

John D said...

The problem is however what if the badgers are found out not to be the cause of the spread, perhaps the cause is the movement of stock or the movement of the inspectors who travel from farm to farm inspecting stock to be sure all the correct EU bozes are ticked and the beasts are full of the correct mix of EU approved hormones, vaccines etc?

Man has lived in much closer proximity to cattle and badgers than they do today and Bovine TB never became a problem of epidemic proportions. I would suggest that the real problem lies in regulations and compliance not an animal that has lived alongside us and cattle for thousands of years.

But there is money to be made by big pharma and their bankster mates so the extermination of brock is the price that is going to be paid.

johnd2008 said...

Thing that puzzles me ,is how do they know that the badger they are shooting has TB? Exterminating badgers from an area just means that the animals from the non culled area will move in. Why not vaccinate ?