A Victory for “People Power”

1st Decem­ber from Stop the Cull

At lunchtime on the 29th of Novem­ber a moment in his­to­ry was cre­at­ed when the guardian released this sto­ry. Telling the world that final­ly the British gov­ern­ment had been beat­en into sub­mis­sion and called an ear­ly end to its wildlife mas­sacre it called a “bad­ger cull”.

The cull was always sold to the British pub­lic as a pilot to see if over a peri­od of 6 weeks, bad­gers could be killed “effec­tive­ly, safe­ly & humane­ly”. Toward the end of those 6 weeks we the pub­lic were told that the orig­i­nal pop­u­la­tion stud­ies had changed and the new pop­u­la­tion fig­ures were actu­al­ly much low­er, they refused to cred­it us the sabs with destroy­ing their Hair DNA pop­u­la­tion stud­ies and instead decid­ed to blame bad­gers for “mov­ing the goal­posts”. With mas­sive­ly reduced pop­u­la­tions (strange­ly David Heath had been com­plain­ing along with many farm­ers of pop­u­la­tion “explo­sions”) the tar­get to kill was made much eas­i­er for them to reach.

What they hadn’t planned on was the per­se­ver­ance, tenac­i­ty, endurance & crafti­ness of those opposed to the cull. Many expe­ri­enced hunt sabo­teurs walked the fields and wood­lands of the cull zones night after night, as did many oth­er peo­ple, these peo­ple just like sabs came from a wide vari­ety of back­grounds, teach­ers, graph­ic design­ers, care work­ers, the very rich, the retired and yes even the unem­ployed and stu­dents. A ded­i­cat­ed num­ber of  these peo­ple before the culls start­ed, going as far back as June last year had been sett sur­vey­ing the entire area, one of them “Jo Bad­ger” recent­ly passed away, her pass­ing has been a great loss to many of us. Their work was the foun­da­tion for all the defence of the bad­gers dur­ing the cull & it is these peo­ple who know how active setts are in cer­tain areas, find­ing the Hair DNA traps was an easy task for them.

With a total of over 500 sq Km’s sur­veyed, pro­tect­ing the bad­gers from free shoot­ers was a ques­tion of team work, whilst some peo­ple work­ing tire­less­ly with­in the law tra­versed hun­dreds of miles of foot­paths and report­ed in any sight­ings, Sab groups and peo­ple pre­pared to break minor tres­pass laws got clos­er to shoot­ers and often moved them on with noise. Sev­er­al weeks into the cull a small for­tune was spent on night vision equip­ment and the amount of shoot­ers being stopped increased rapid­ly. That equip­ment like the fuel in the tanks was gen­er­ous­ly donat­ed by sup­port­ers from across the coun­try, with­out their sup­port the cam­paign would have strug­gled great­ly and we would like to take this oppor­tu­ni­ty to thank every­one who helped with fundrais­ing to get peo­ple to the zones.

When the 6 week culls end­ed and it was announced in Som­er­set that they hadn’t achieved their tar­gets we sighed with relief & pre­pared to focus just on Glouces­ter­shire for the final week, to our dis­may they announced exten­sions, in Som­er­set with the dras­ti­cal­ly reduced pop­u­la­tions they announced that they had to kill anoth­er 165 bad­gers over a three week peri­od. Hav­ing man­aged to kill over 100 a week dur­ing the 6 week cull peo­ple on the ground knew they had a lot of work to do to stop them reach­ing their tar­gets. With lit­tle or no hol­i­day time left to claim many peo­ple took unpaid leave from work, rela­tion­ships were strained and many peo­ple were suf­fer­ing with extreme fatigue. Still they did not give up, with the weight of know­ing that the culls would be rolled out if these suc­ceed­ed, peo­ple buck­led down to the work know­ing that tens of thou­sands of bad­gers lives were in the bal­ance. At the end of the 3 week exten­sion 90 bad­gers had been killed, mak­ing the Som­er­set cull and exten­sion a fail­ure.

The shoot­ers hav­ing failed at free shoot­ing ear­ly on had gone over heav­i­ly to cage trap­ping as a tried and test­ed method of killing large num­bers of bad­gers, when we knew this for sure, our efforts accord­ing­ly var­ied and we focussed as much resources as pos­si­ble at find­ing cage traps and “neu­tral­is­ing” them. In Som­er­set we nev­er found more than 3 cages on one sett. Mean­while in Glouces­ter­shire the fig­ures on the total killed came out, it was shock­ing­ly low at only 30% of the revised pop. fig­ure, Nat­ur­al Eng­land issued an exten­sion for 8 weeks with a tar­get of just 58% to achieve “dis­ease con­trol” the NFU didn’t mess about and prompt­ly put down hun­dreds of traps.

Protest cul­ture has for some years attrib­uted minor crim­i­nal dam­age done at night to “pix­ies”. Some peo­ple find this word annoy­ing, just as oth­er peo­ple don’t iden­ti­fy with the word “sab”. Seman­tics to one side, the cage traps were destroyed as fast as they went down, for the most part by very nor­mal peo­ple doing extra­or­di­nary work, through the day traps were found then by night they were destroyed, each one cost­ing approx £150. In just over 4 weeks near­ly 400 of these traps had been made use­less. With “free shoot­ing” being proven to be a method­ol­o­gy that didn’t work, cage trap­ping was under­tak­en to kill as many bad­gers as pos­si­ble. We the British pub­lic just weren’t hav­ing it.

Whilst we cel­e­brate the fail­ure of these bad­ger culls and the part we played in their down­fall, we mourn the loss of all the bad­gers that have been need­less­ly killed dur­ing this cull. We would ask any­one who thinks that killing bad­gers to stop the spread of bTB to spend a few min­utes watch­ing this video filmed just before the culls start­ed

We will con­tin­ue with our cam­paign, film­ing farm con­di­tions, sab­bing pheas­ant shoots, organ­is­ing boy­cotts, all the time build­ing our num­bers and reach on social media. The culls may con­tin­ue, but so will we.

As has been proven today, if you ignore the will of the peo­ple, the peo­ple will fight back, we are organ­ised, we have built teams of peo­ple who rely on each oth­er, our sup­port­ers know the meth­ods we use and are com­fort­able know­ing that we behave hon­ourably, we know how to dis­rupt culls, we are strong and we are many, and we will nev­er leave our bad­gers unde­fend­ed to be attacked by brutes and thugs.

NEVER