Editor’s View: Brian May’s badger blind spot lets him down
Brian May and the Save Me Trust's Anne Brummer © Save Me Trust What should make us most angry and despondent about the bovine TB permacrisis?
There is a long list of contenders, but the deepest frustration stems from victory being so far away in even the most optimistic predictions.
How can those in affected areas be anything but angry when the next reactor is always just round the corner?
See also: Video: Brian May – ‘Badgers are irrelevant in cattle TB spread’
About the author
There is seemingly no end in sight to this disease that saps any hope for a thriving and profitable business.
This is what has taken such a toll on the mental health of so many farmers with direct experience of this invisible menace.
In his BBC programme, Brian May: The Badgers, The Farmers and Me, which airs this evening (23 August), the Queen guitarist and famed badger activist is profoundly moved by the plight of cattle farmers.
I saw the show earlier this week and, before I criticise its shortcomings, it is worth stating that he recognises more of the difficulties than you may expect and would like to see us find a way past them.
It is a low bar that he says many of his associates in the so-called animal welfare community have failed to clear – preferring instead to simply hope that mass uptake of plant-based diets are just over the horizon and meat and dairy farms will be consigned to history.
Indeed, Sir Brian himself campaigned on the issue of protecting badgers from culls for five years before he started engaging seriously with the farming community in 2016.
And he has: by observing on-farm trials looking at reducing the spread of the disease between cattle, offering to fund badger vaccination and even bringing farmers together to discuss new ways of tackling the disease.
Yet underpinning this is a seemingly unshakeable desire to go on a journey with a preselected destination.
And that is not a commitment to follow the science, wherever it takes us, on the road to eliminating the disease.
Instead, it is to eliminate any suggestion that badgers are a part of the problem in its spread.
As he says: “I have to be clear and tell you that the place I come from is that even if badgers were the cause of the spread of bovine TB in cattle, I wouldn’t be in favour of killing them.”
This is an ideological trap and one that should have been obvious to BBC commissioning editors from the outset.
It’s like asking Ronald McDonald to do a documentary on the obesity crisis. But ranting about the programme is a sideshow.
Brian May is not the enemy, bovine TB is. The lesson to take from it is that our industry’s outlook cannot be as simplistic as the badger lobby’s.
The urge to make the striped mammal the only bogeyman in this fight must be resisted.
To preserve political support for what culling is deemed necessary, we must also be fervent about upgrading on-farm biosecurity, campaigning for more accurate tests, and championing high-quality research into vaccines.
The only place from which we have a modest chance to win this fight is the moral high ground.