Hugh Wilson

Is It Ever Acceptable To Cull Wildlife?

Badgers are to be culled in Wales in an attempt to combat TB in cattle. In a move that has already provoked outrage among animal welfare groups, the Welsh government has sanctioned a pilot scheme to measure the effect of a cull on the spread of the disease.

There’s little doubt that bovine TB is a serious problem. Christianne Glossop, chief veterinary officer for Wales, said the disease was “out of control”. But serious questions remains over whether a wildlife cull is the best way to tackle it.

The RSPCA, for one, is certain that a slaughter of badgers is both cruel and ineffective. “This decision flies in the face of sound scientific judgement. A cull would be a worrying waste of time, resources and badger lives," said the organisation’s John Avizienius.

Your View: Is it ever acceptable to cull wildlife?

In fact, there’s some evidence that killing wildlife only makes matters worse. The Government’s Independent Scientific Group on Cattle TB found that culling caused badgers to disperse more widely, increasing the spread of the disease.

But the proposed cull in Wales won’t be the first officially sanctioned slaughter of wildlife in recent years. Increasingly, it seems, authorities in Britain and around the world are turning to controlled killing in an attempt to limit numbers of animals that have been deemed a disease threat, a nuisance, or a risk to economic well being. Needless to say, in each case – with one notable exception - the arguments for and against culling have been fierce. Here are three contrasting cases.

Video: Badger cull announced

Hedgehog Heaven

To most of us, hedgehogs are nothing more than timid visitors to suburban gardens. In the Outer Hebrides, however, they’re considered a menace, decimating populations of ground nesting birds because of their fondness for eggs.

The solution, until last year, was an annual cull of hedgehogs on the islands. Supporters of the killing said that hedgehogs are not native to the islands and have no natural predators. The cull, they argued, simply re-established an ecological balance that rocketing hedgehog numbers had destroyed.

But they hadn’t reckoned on public sentiment. The annual round of lethal injections caused an outcry. Celebrities like Brian May and Joanna Lumley declared their opposition. Anti-cull campaigners agreed with the need to cut hedgehog numbers, but argued for more humane ways of going about it. In 2007 the cull was ceased. In its place, a relocation programme was established to move hedgehogs to less ecologically sensitive areas.

Getting the Goat

Goats have roamed the craggy outcrops of Snowdonia for 10,000 years. But since 2006, large numbers have been culled to allow sheep to graze more easily and to protect young trees and domestic gardens from their ravenous appetites.

Nobody denies that goat numbers have surged in recent years and that the increasingly cheeky animals can cause problems. But campaigners say that culling can be indiscriminate, and sometimes misdirected. There’s no way of knowing whether damage to the local environment is caused by sheep or goats, they argue, or whether marksmen are shooting goats called ‘primitives’ – those with a lineage stretching right back to the end of the last ice age. “A cull like this could hasten the extinction of an ancient breed,” said one campaigner.

Toad Day Out

Occasionally, culls are not only deemed necessary, they’re universally welcomed. That’s certainly the case with the cane toad, a species introduced to Australia by sugar farmers in the 1930s in a disastrous attempt to control the sweet-toothed scarab beetle. The toads left the beetles alone, and devoured pretty much anything else.

They’ve since ravaged the native flora and fauna of large parts of Australia, protected by skins that are poisonous to nearly every native predator. Even Australia’s feared freshwater crocodiles have been found floating lifeless and belly up after snacking on the toxic toads.

So when - just a couple of weeks ago - a Queensland MP proposed an annual day of cane toad killing called the Toad Day Out, not even the RSPCA batted an eyelid. Kill them humanely, the organisation said, and the cull would have its blessing.

And the plan is for millions of Queenslanders, and especially children, to spend a day each January hunting toads, with the captured vermin frozen to death in domestic freezers. "If even 3000 female toads were collected, this has the potential of eliminating 60 million toads," said MP Shane Knuth.

And in contrast to pretty much any other wildlife cull, nobody even mentions the rights of the animals.