Over 100 protesters, including many from the Burnham-On-Sea area, joined a special protest walk on Tuesday night (October 16th) to air their concerns about the proposed cull of badgers across the west country.
They also welcomed the news that the imminent cull of badgers in Gloucestershire and Somerset could face being voted down by MPs next week after opponents were granted a Commons debate on the issue on 25th October.
Ministers approved the cull of up to 100,000 animals in an attempt to curb the growing problem of tuberculosis in cattle, but the scheme has provoked the largest animal rights protest since fox hunting was banned in the 1990s.
East Huntspill based Secretworld and the Badger Protection League (BPL) organised Tuesday night’s peaceful protest, pictured here, called the ‘Badger Night Walk’, in Dunster.
Pauline Kidner, founder of Secretworld, told Burnham-On-Sea.com: “We have every sympathy for farmers experiencing a Bovine TB breakdown in their cattle, but they are being led up the garden path. This is an experiment on killing badgers based on no science, with no safety buffers for humans or animals either near to or on public footpaths.”
“There are also no clear numbers of badgers to be killed and no knowledge of the effects of the spread of Bovine TB in cattle. Already the government has spent another £4.7 million of our, the taxpayers, money on a purely political plan of carnage. We are all joining together to say no to badger culling.”
The call for the parliamentary debate was supported by a cross-party group of 36 MPs. The motion to be debated next week states: “This house recognises that significant, independent scientific research has demonstrated that culling badgers will have little effect on reducing the rate of bovine TB; acknowledges that culling may even exacerbate the problem; notes that the e-petition against the current plans for culling passed in a very short period of time the 100,000 figure required to make it eligible for debate in parliament and that it continues to attract impressive levels of support from members of the public; calls on the government to stop any planned or present culling of badgers; and further calls on the government to introduce a vaccination programme and measures to improve biosecurity with immediate effect.”
