Late last year, the environment secretary Caroline Spellman announced that badger culling would go ahead in 2012 in an effort to combat bovine tuberculosis (TB). Now that the locations of pilot culls have been named, the scheme is suddenly becoming a reality, but is the cull justified and will it be effective?

Badgers are one of Britain’s most enigmatic mammals due to their nocturnal nature, and are usually only seen either wombling across a road late at night or more likely, as road-kill. Traffic will be the least of the worries of badgers in parts of Gloucestershire and Somerset however, as these are the areas in which pilot culls will be implemented. Culling badgers is not a new phenomenon, with extermination efforts taking place on and off throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, and although the emphasis here is on ‘pilot’, there is the potential for more widespread action across the rest of the UK.

The cull is objectionable for two key reasons. On a deontological level, the cull represents humanity’s tendency for species-chauvinism. Environmental, and admittedly conservation, issues are often driven by the logic that humans are more important than, and have the authority to remove other species should they pose a threat. Which would be valid and defensible if the species in question was threatening human lives, for instance I’m sure less people would be opposed to eradicating the species of mosquito that carries malaria. The threat badgers pose however, is only to our cows, a non-essential element of human life, despite what some might claim, and so the organised killing of them for our benefit is unjustified.

The badger - one of Britain’s most enigmatic mammals. Source: bbc.com

Unfortunately in itself, this moral argument does not stand, as by the same reasoning I should be advocating vegetarianism – which I am not. A more convincing argument comes in the form of the scientific justification for the cull, or lack thereof, in that there is evidence that a cull may actually increase the spread of bovine TB rather than stem it. Amongst others this view is supported by Rosie Woodroffe, a senior research fellow at the Zoological Society of London, and her research. It was found that although a cull may marginally reduce the incidence of cattle TB in the focal area, badgers are likely to disperse as result of the disruption, and the areas in the vicinity could suffer an increased incidence of TB as a result.

Despite these anti-cull arguments, it is presumably still favoured by the Government because of the potential short term reduction in bovine tuberculosis a cull could bring. It is easy to see the appeal when it is estimated that roughly one billion pounds of the taxpayer’s money could be spent over the next ten years tackling the problem.

This would hold if it wasn’t for the method of cull chosen. To decrease the incidence of TB in cattle by a notable amount, an efficient method such as gassing must be used. Not, as the government has seen fit, the ‘farmers and their guns’ technique.  Whilst this may serve to appease angry farmers with a grudge against badgers, I doubt the random shooting of badgers will actually have a significant impact on a population.

A preferred alternative to culling is vaccination, a method which has had some success in captive badgers. Studies are currently underway into its applicability in wild populations. This however is of no consolation to the badgers who will be culled in the coming year or the animal groups that are opposed to the cull. The only saving grace is that with any luck badgers will avoid being shot by exploiting a trait of theirs that the powers that be seem to have overlooked. Surely shooting nocturnal badgers in the dark is hardly going to yield fantastic results. The deaths of any that are unlucky enough to meet a gun-slinging farmer in the coming nights can be put down to little more than myopic mustelid murder.

A recent flurry of articles expounding the effects of the current mild winter on the natural world serves to remind us of the consequences of climate change, but do these examples contain any scientific meaning, or are they merely interesting, if foreboding, anecdotal tidbits?

Spring flowers such as hazel catkins, snowdrops, and daffodils, traditionally expected in late January or early February, have been seen across the UK from as early as Christmas Day. Hedgehogs and other hibernating mammals such as bats have been active in defiance of their normal winter tactics, whilst red admiral butterflies have been taking advantage of the almost balmy climate. Even the birds and the bees are following suit by living up to their eponymous phrase earlier than in previous years, with robins singing, wood pigeons rearing young, and buff-tailed bumblebees managing to emerge uncharacteristically early.

Hedgehogs have been active recently in defiance of their normal winter tactics. Source: http://www.doeni.gov.uk

Keeping records of such phenological events is entrenched in British tradition. Records of the first cuckoo of spring or the first leafing dates of trees have been kept for hundreds of years. Data such as this can prove useful in providing evidence for the effects of anthropogenic climate change on individual species or groups. For instance it has been shown that since 1939 UK birds such as the wren, have been steadily breeding earlier. Countless examples of phenological advances such as this can be found across a diverse range of organisms, but can they advance our understanding of the deeper biological implications of climate change on ecosystems?

When taken in isolation, the answer is not really. A 2005 paper by Dutch scientists Visser and Both acknowledged the fact that on its own, evidence of phenological advances could illustrate contrasting climate change impacts. Positive if the advances were evidence of adaptation to climate change, or negative if that species was becoming increasingly out of synchronisation with its environment. The latter cannot be known unless data also exists for other important species with which it interacts, for instance we cannot know if an advance in flowering date is beneficial or detrimental to a given plant unless we know whether or not its insect pollinator has also advanced. The point is a ‘yardstick’ by which to judge the potential impact of a phenological shift on a species is needed.

Whilst this may seem obvious, more cryptically it has also been shown that the use of these ‘firsts’ is fundamentally a poor indicator on which to judge the effects of climate change on a species. Granted, the ‘first’ cuckoo of spring has been getting earlier and earlier, but this data alone tells us nothing about what the rest of the population is doing. It would be much more informative, according to Jean-Pierre Moussus and colleagues, to use the mean date of a phenological event to analyse and predict the effects of climate change on a population.

Unfortunately phenological data for many individuals in a population is a rare luxury, let alone equivalent data for the species with which they interact. Many researchers however, unlike some species to climate change, are adapting to this way of thinking and are designing experimental systems accordingly, with the aim of painting a more complete picture of the impacts of climate change.