Plans to cull badgers in Pembrokeshire will not work and amount to little more than a Welsh assembly effort to secure farmers' votes

It would be stupid to deny that badgers are both a reservoir and a vector of bovine TB. They are not the only ones of course: cattle are also responsible for spreading the disease among themselves. But you don't have to deny it to believe that the eradication programme being planned in Wales is mad.

In England last year, after listening to scientific advice, the government decided not to cull badgers. As Lord Krebs, who previously led badger culling trials, pointed out, to have any effect on TB transmission, the government would need to kill badgers

over areas larger than 100 square kilometres – maybe 200 to 300 sq km – for five to six years and you would have to be really culling hard. To do that is a massive operation. If you were to implement that in all so-called hotspot areas around the country where TB is more prevalent, it would involve killing 170,000 badgers – that's half the UK badger population over five years – to get a modest reduction in TB in cattle.

But the Welsh assembly government has just published a consultation document proposing "a proactive non-selective cull of badgers within an intensive action pilot area". Translated into human speech, this means the total eradication of badgers from north Pembrokeshire.

It is brutal, futile and incomprehensible. It's not just that. As Krebs showed, eradication programmes like this cannot do much to control the disease.

It is also politically impossible to replicate this pilot project across the country. Using culling to prevent badgers from spreading TB in Wales would mean eliminating the entire badger population in this country, and - because badgers don't respect borders - in much of England as well. Quite rightly, Welsh and English people will not put up with this, so it's not an option. So what is the point of a pilot project for a programme that cannot be executed?

Stranger still, the Welsh consultation document admits that

vaccination is another tool to reduce disease prevalence in susceptible [badger] populations.

Injectable badger vaccines will be licensed for sale by next year, and oral bait vaccines will be available from 2014. Oral vaccines, which can simply be left outside the setts, are likely to be much cheaper to deploy than either mass culling or mass injections. No one would object to this, so why not wait until they become available?

The only likely reason appears to be politics. Many Welsh farmers hate badgers with a passion out of all proportion to the harm they might do. Even in areas where there is no bovine TB, you see astonishing numbers of dead badgers along the roads, often in places where there are no setts for miles. Everyone here knows what's going on: farmers shoot them, then dump the carcasses beside the road. Autopsies are rarely conducted on what appears to be roadkill, and even when you do find bullets or shot in the dead badgers, it's next to impossible to trace the people responsible.

In the snow last winter, I followed a set of badger tracks up the hill behind my house. They stopped in a spray of blood. At first I thought the badger must have killed something. But then they moved off again, dragging a trail of blood all the way up the hill. After about 300 metres, a set of human footprints converged with the badger trail, and the badger prints stopped in a mess of trampled snow and blood. More roadkill, in other words.

For the reasons I've put forward, the Pembrokeshire badger cull cannot possibly help to eliminate TB from Wales. But that is not what it's about. It appears to be a symbolic measure, whose purpose is to show farmers that the government is doing battle with the animal they hate. It has nothing to do with saving cattle from TB, and plenty to do with saving the backsides of assembly members at the next election.

monbiot.com