Linda Ward, of Oxfordshire Badger Group, has written a letter to protest against the shooting of 5,000 badgers in Oxfordshire over the next eight weeks.

I was one of the many ‘badgers’ protesting silently outside Oxford University’s Department of Biology on Friday.

The badger cull season started on September 1.

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Over the next eight weeks around 5,000 healthy badgers will be shot in Oxfordshire alone.

We estimate around 60 per cent of the county (west of a line from Banbury to Thame) is a killing zone.

Shooters aim to ‘remove’ seven in 10 badgers.

They are operating within 5-10 miles of Oxford city. The cull is NOT being ‘phased out’ as promised. This year many new licences have been issued and existing ones expanded .

The Government may break its promise to end culling in 2025. It is to consult on introducing 100 per cent culling in response to new bovine TB (bTB) outbreaks in cattle herds.

Culling could continue indefinitely.

Yet scientific evidence from 10 years of culling shows that culling every badger in the country won’t affect the spread of the disease.

bTB is hidden in the herd and passed from cow to cow.

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The farming industry does not want to bear the cost of taking the better cattle measures that could eradicate it quickly.

“Business as usual” has already cost 210,000 badger’s lives and could drive badgers to extinction across large areas of Oxfordshire.

This is not acceptable – polling shows that more people than ever (80 per cent of adults) oppose culling. Covid has taught us how to control an infectious disease.

We call on Oxford University to speak out. It’s original research (the 2013 Randomised Badger Culling Trial) is outdated.

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It is being misused to justify the genocide of a native species.

The university rightly, is proud of it’s reputation for shaping evidence base policy. Scientific and moral integrity demands that it cannot remain silent when badgers face extermination in Oxford's name.

We urge the university’s leaders to call for badger culling to stop and to ban culling on it's land.

For the sake of the cows, the badgers the farmers and the reputation Oxford University.

Members of staff and the public can amplify the message by asking  their MP to call for an end to culling. The badger cull was 'born' in Oxford and we must stop it here.

Linda Ward

Trustee, Oxfordshire Badger Group

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About the author 

Andy is the Trade and Tourism reporter for the Oxford Mail and you can sign up to his newsletters for free here. 

He joined the team more than 20 years ago and he covers community news across Oxfordshire.

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