by David Williams @Chairman, Badger Trust

I read with interest your article about a meeting with Bryan Hill. Two directors of the Badger Trust were asked to meet Mr Hill and two of his colleagues, but neither his report nor yours paints a true picture of the meeting.

The Badger Trust representatives listened to Mr Hill assert that he could recognise so-called “sick” badger setts, but he did not explain in any detail what signs he could see that led to his conclusion. He also believes in a certain type of badger behaviour that supports his conclusions. We do not accept the concept of a “sick” sett because the Central Science Laboratory and later the Food and Environment Research Agency found that both sick and disease-free animals could live in the same sett. This was at the Woodchester Park field station in Gloucestershire.

In more than 30 years of intensive studies and research into badger behaviour, principally by Woodchester and Oxford University, there is no evidence to support Mr Hill’s claims. There are further difficulties with this rural myth:

At the time of writing the Government has not announced where trial badger culls would take place.

We cannot have a “better understanding” because Mr Hill has still not produced any written evidence or statement for us to consider how his claimed methods work, although we undertook to give such written evidence full consideration.

To suggest that we are now more in tune with farmers’ problems is disingenuous to say the least, but the Badger Trust has always been sympathetic to the serious difficulties bovine TB causes for farmers and their stock.

No-one at the meeting suggested that farmers were the enemy. We say the enemy for all parties is the disease.

It is difficult to understand how Mr Hill can be sure his system for identifying a “sick” badger sett could work. Without digging out the sett, killing all the badgers and removing them for a post-mortem it would be impossible to confirm that all or indeed any were infected with bovine TB – work he admits he has never undertaken. Nor should he, because it would be illegal.

Mr Hill said that once he had identified a “sick” sett, badgers were then (illegally) gassed with carbon monoxide. Besides the illegality, the piecemeal removal of badgers has been shown by the £50 million Randomised Badger Culling Trial of 1998-2006 to risk making the bovine TB problem worse.

I am afraid that all our meeting confirmed was that Mr Hill ’s methods cannot be taken seriously because he has not produced any evidence that could prove his methods.