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| Badger cull: police make first arrests | Badger cull: police make first arrests |
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| Police have made their first arrests in the countryside cull zones where badgers are 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. | |
| Six-week culls aimed at killing about 5,000 badgers are now under way 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. | |
| Ministers and the National Farmers' Union (NFU) say 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. | |
| The badger cull in England has sparked the largest animal rights protest since hunting foxes with dogs was banned. On Friday, an official government e-petition opposing the cull passed 300,000 signatures, making it the largest to date. Brian May, guitarist from the rock band Queen, who created 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. | |
| />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 a police spokesman. The four later gave their details and were "de-arrested at the scene and not taken to custody", he added. The police had previously said they would allow protesters to "bend the law" to facilitate peaceful opposition. | |
| 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. | 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. |
| 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. | 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. |