Badgers have re-established themselves so successfully they no longer need special protection.

I fear many things for agricultural production in the UK and among these is the containment, constriction, and then elimination, of cattle farming, both beef and dairy, as the results of longstanding government inability to establish effective controls on the spread of bovine TB bed in.

The inevitable emergence of cattle-free areas, most likely to be first seen in South-West England or the Welsh Marches, will signal that farmers have begun to give up on the emotionally painful and financially expensive task of keeping cattle free of bTB while they are at the same time surrounded by aggressively protected badgers, some of which carry the disease too, and which can pass back the disease to cattle herds which, as a result of a determined slaughter policy, may have been temporarily bTB-free.

I have no doubt that bTB circulates on a ping-pong basis between cattle and badgers and then badgers and cattle and will continue to do so until the link is broken.

Unfortunately current controls are hopelessly lopsided because only diseased cattle are slaughtered while infected badgers continue to roam free – which means despite the shooting of tens of thousands of TB positive cattle each year the circle of contamination and re-contamination between the species is unchecked.

It is also unfortunate that badgers have become all but untouchable because they are seen as so vulnerable that each representative of the species must be aggressively protected – even if they harbour bTB and can pass it on to other badgers, as well as cattle they have contact with, mainly through infected urine, faeces and saliva.

I argue that badgers no longer need such all-embracing protection and government acceptance they are flourishing and their population is expanding ought to encourage a more comprehensive approach to universal bTB control – and eventually perhaps its elimination.

Some evidence is anecdotal but nevertheless real. I was born in West Northumberland in 1947 and at that time badgers were rare.

So rare in fact that the first one I saw, which was dead, was brought to our village school sometime around 1960 by the farmer who collected its kitchen swill.

The headmaster was keen to show his pupils this previously unseen creature, which must have been fighting because its throat had been savaged, and so for a day it was displayed and its physiology, stiff hair, dog-like teeth, and digging claws, closely examined.

Like all country boys in their early teens we roamed widely over summer evenings and around two years later, I came across my first live badger.

It was half grown, so could be caught, and was taken by us back to a farm where an excited parent rang the local photographer to tell him “the boys had caught a live badger”.

The snapper, who was a farmer too, may not have arrived with a squeal of brakes but he came straight way and took pictures which for a number of years were among those covering village life that were shown and re-shown at a variety of locations each winter – which has to be proof that in the 1960’s badgers were regarded by our community as extremely interesting as well extremely rare.

Since then they have re-established themselves and evidence of their success is overwhelming. It’s not just the number of road side corpses, at least two fresh bodies on local roads each week, but the constantly expanding range of their setts as well.

Some, in the lowlands, have been in the same location for decades but over the last twenty years badgers have, for the first time in living memory, moved onto higher ground and established setts deep in North-West Northumberland’s LFA’s – some of them fringing heather moor.

I have no deep seated objection to this, in fact my reaction when I see them is extremely benign, but I am annoyed by unrelenting assertions that each badger still needs to be determinedly protected and worry that this unnecessary zealousness will eventually constrict cattle farming to the point that so many beef or dairy farmers give up that cattle-free zones begin to emerge.

A new, and effective control policy for bTB which acknowledges that badgers are now a successful, and expanding, species must be quickly constructed despite inevitable objections from those who consider continuing, and unnecessary, over protection of badgers a political totem.

Things move on. Badgers are no longer an endangered species and if some populations, in some locations, are not thinned down their on-going re-population is a threat not just a threat to nearby cattle but also themselves.