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Badger cull: Gloucestershire police hold four night walkers Badger cull: police make first arrests
(about 1 hour later)
Four people have been arrested by police inside the Gloucestershire badger cull zone. Police have made their first arrests in the countryside cull zones where badgers are currently being killed in night-time shoots. The four people arrested in the Gloucestershire cull zone were held on suspicion of aggravated trespass after police responded to reports of horns being blown and individuals straying from a public footpath.
They were held on suspicion of aggravated trespass after police responded to reports of horns being blown and individuals straying from a public footpath. Six-week-long culls aimed at killing about 5,000 badgers are now underway in Gloucestershire and Somerset and protesters and wounded badger patrols are in the zones each night. Activists using vuvuzelas and bright torches to frighten off badgers have disrupted a handful of shoots, according to information leaked to the Guardian by government sources.
Gloucestershire police said the four refused to give the arresting officer their details after they were stopped near the village of Forthampton at around 2am on Friday. A short time later they supplied the information and were released, the force confirmed. The four were not taken into custody. Ministers and the National Farmers Union (NFU) insist that badger culling is essential to curb rising tuberculosis in cattle, which led to 38,000 cattle being slaughtered in 2012 at a cost of £100m to taxpayers. If the current pilot culls show the shooting to be humane and effective, a wider cull will begin and is likely to kill more than 100,000 badgers. However, many prominent scientific experts argue that more restrictions on cattle movements and vaccination programmes will be more effective and potentially less expensive than a cull.
Brian May, guitarist with the rock band Queen, is due to visit Gloucestershire on Friday to visit the cull zone. The badger cull in England has sparked the largest animal rights protest since hunting foxes with dogs was banned and on Friday an official government e-petition opposing the cull passed 300,000 signatures, making it the largest to date. Queen guitarist Brian May, who initiated the e-petition, said: "The cull is the most unpopular thing this government has ever done, if their own petition website is any measure." A rally in Taunton on Saturday will be the latest protest march.
May, a leading opponent of the cull, will be in the Tewkesbury area to meet residents and discuss their views on the pilot. A member of the Team Badger campaign, he will also join a peaceful night walk being staged by anti-cull activists. The Gloucestershire arrests were made at 2am on Friday, near the village of Forthampton. "Four people were arrested on suspicion of aggravated trespass and refused to give officers their details," said police spokesman. The four later gave their details and were "de-arrested at the scene and not taken to custody," he said. The police had previously said they would allow protesters to "bend the law" in order to facilitate peaceful protest.
An online petition that May started against the pilots has become the most signed on the official government website, with more than 300,000 names on it. "It remains a clear indication of the depth and continued growth of public outrage over environment secretary Owen Paterson's plan to kill thousands of badgers in the UK," May said. The Guardian understands that the arrests were not made in relation to a legal injunction obtained by the NFU against protesters, which includes provisions to prevent protesters from entering private land without consent and protects farmers from threats and harassment. One activist, Jay Tiernan of the Stop the Cull campaign, was arrested in August at a government site in Stroud but has not being charged.
"It's also now the most unpopular thing this government has ever done, if their own petition website is any measure." The National Farmers' Union confirmed that the west Somerset cull began last week and opponents believe that the shooting in west Gloucestershire started on Tuesday night. A key purpose of the pilot culls is to assess whether shooting free-running badgers – as opposed to the more expensive option of trapping them first – can be a humane method of killing. The government will be next week forced to reveal full details of how this is being monitored, after it lost an appeal over a freedom of information request in which it had heavily redacted the relevant document. The plan, released to the Humane Society International UK, already revealed that noises made by dying badgers would be among the measures used to assess the humaneness of the shooting.
The pilots are aimed at tackling tuberculosis in cattle by killing about 5,000 badgers over a six-week period.
If culling can be done effectively, safely and humanely, plans will be implemented to roll out the scheme in areas that are hotspots for bovine tuberculosis (TB).
Farmers and the government insist that culling of badgers, which can spread TB to cattle, is needed to stop spiralling rates of the disease in herds. But opponents say culling the protected animal will have only a small effect on infection rates in cattle and will lead to badgers suffering. They want the emphasis to be on vaccines and tighter on-farm and cattle movement measures.
May said he would oppose any steps to expand the badger cull beyond Gloucestershire and Somerset.
"We may be too late to prevent this tragedy happening in west England. But we will continue to stand against this," he said.