COULD providing badgers with extra hedgerows to use as latrines slow the spread of tuberculosis to cattle? That is one strategy being proposed as an alternative to widespread culling, the solution said to be favoured by the British government.
Bovine TB in the UK is growing by an average of 18 per cent a year. While farmers are adamant that killing badgers is the only way to prevent the animals spreading the disease, the government鈥檚 scientific advisers have said that localised culls don鈥檛 solve the problem (New 杏吧原创, 17 December 2005, p 8).
鈥淔or TB the area under hedgerow is more important than badger density鈥�
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Support for the hedgerow option comes in a report published on Wednesday by Fiona Mathews and colleagues at the University of Oxford鈥檚 Wildlife Conservation Research Unit. When they compared farms with and without TB between 1994 and 1999, they found the abundance of hedgerows to be much more important than badger density in determining whether TB was present in cattle (Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2006.0461).
