As well as running a now Devon-wide badger volunteer lead vaccination programme, I have also been spending a lot of time in the Somerset Badger Cull Zone, working alongside local people opposed to the slaughter of their wildlife. I had prepared myself for the distress I would feel at the sight and sound of dying badgers, and to expect a fair amount of chaos as folk charged around the countryside either attempting to kill or to save badgers, sometimes encountering sudden and unexpected road blocks put up by the police.
Whilst all those things are indeed happening, what has shocked me most has been the effect of all this on the local community. I haven’t seen this degree of division and conflict in the UK since the Miners strike in the 1980’s. Neighbour is pitted against neighbour, farmer against farmer, farmers against villagers, and farmers against the National Farmers’ Union.
Elderly women have been threatened with legal action by the police for ‘outing’ their wildlife-killing neighbours. Hardworking locals are giving up their nights, and their peace of mind, to patrol their neighbourhood looking for marksmen. Folk in isolated farmhouses have found themselves surrounded, night after night, by men shooting high velocity rifles and blocking all means of escape.
To say the atmosphere is tense would be a huge understatement; at times it is positively terrifying. There is nothing so frightening as to find oneself in the pitch dark, surrounded by an unknown number of shooters who can see you in their night vision gear, but who you cannot see at all, especially when you have no way out to safety. I know because I’ve found myself surrounded by shooters whilst walking a quiet country lane near a friends house in the Somerset ‘zone’, in the dark, in a heavy mist, and seeing flashes of lights, dogs barking and men telling those dogs to be quiet, from both sides of the lane at once. For a heart stopping minute I thought they were aiming their guns right at me as I could see three points of red light pointing towards me, before I realised they were two red tail lights of a car in the middle of a field being reflected by the twigs of the hedge! The relief in finding they were not the infra red sight lines was enormous, until I realised I was still surrounded by shooters and had no way of knowing how many of them there were and whether they were aiming towards me or not. My heart breaks for the kind elderly folk who live at the end of this lane, who have been woken night after night by shooting, often at 4am, who are passionately opposed to the killing of their wildlife life but are powerless to stop it.
They’ve told me since that they don’t believe there are any badgers left at all in the land around them; a clear breach of the licence to only kill 70% of the badger population. The numbers of badgers was only ever a gestimate, and as there are reports of kullers delivering packages of dead badgers to farmers to dispose of, and as there are no independent witnesses of the shootings or of the bodies collected, how on earth can we tell whether they are adhering to the numbers agreed with Natural England? This ’trial cull’ is a shambles from beginning to end.
As a woman I know well was among a group of protestors who had shots fired over their heads, despite wearing high-viz waistcoats and shining torches, I have found it is best not to trust your personal safety to these gunmen. I have already heard of one culler being removed from the culling team for “random shooting”, and I have seen convoys of marksmen making their contempt for our peaceful protest known by filming us and shouting obscenities as they pass, they seem particularly to enjoy harassing groups of female badger patrollers, although we have discovered they aren’t so keen if you film them in return. A good friend of mine was in a car full of female protestors who were rammed by cullers recently in Somerset, she has now fitted a camera to the back of her car and they haven’t tried that again. However a lone female protestor had a firework thrown at her car in Gloucestershire, wrecking the rear window screen. Anyone who works in the world of tackling domestic violence will tell you that violence against women is often preceded by violent abuse of animals… Do we really want men like these roaming our neighbourhoods?
All this is happening in beautiful rural parts of the West Country, all for a scientifically unjustifiable, politically-motivated exercise to test the so-called ‘humaneness’ of the killing method used to massacre a nationally loved and protected species. The wounds inflicted on our rural communities by this Government’s reckless policy will take many decades to heal.
Ama Menec
