British taxpayers pay £6,000 a dead badger in useless killing

This video is called European badger (Meles meles).

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Scientifically unsound cull costs 6,000 a badger

Thursday 3rd August 2015

THE COST of killing a badger is well over £6,000, it was revealed yesterday, days after the government announced plans to extend culling licences to tackle the spread of tuberculosis in cattle.

This is despite evidence from a panel of independent experts showing that only 1.6 per cent of badgers that test positive for bovine tuberculosis (bTB) are able to spread it to cows.

Last week, a four-year licence to shoot 835 badgers was extended to Dorset by public body Natural England. Culls in Gloucestershire and Somerset will also be repeated.

Animal rights campaigners complain that the policy is “cruel and ineffective” as well as an “unacceptable burden on the taxpayer.”

It is expected that a total of 2,000 badgers will be killed this year at a cost of at least £13 million. The policy has already drained the public purse of £16.8m over the past three years.

With 2,476 badgers killed in the first two years of culling, the price tag works out at £6,775 for each animal culled, said the Badger Trust, which asked the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to release the figures in a freedom of information request.

If the cull was rolled out to more than 40 areas in England, the cost could easily exceed half a billion pounds, said Badger Trust chief executive Dominic Dyer.

Farming Minister George Eustice had insisted that “strong action” was needed to stop the spread of bTB in cattle in order to protect the dairy and beef industries.

But the Tory government has disbanded the independent expert panel, after it found that the pilot culls in 2013 were neither effective nor humane.