England’s Badger Cull Is Effectively Over
For once, there is news worth cautiously celebrating. Badger culling has effectively ended in England.
Defra has confirmed that the final licence, issued in Cumbria in 2024, will not receive the annual authorisation needed to continue. That means the policy of blaming, targeting and killing badgers for bovine TB is finally being brought to an end. Good. It should never have taken this long.
Badgers were made scapegoats for a disease problem rooted in cattle farming. More than 270,000 cattle have been killed because of bovine TB over the last decade, but the answer was never to turn on another species and pretend that slaughtering wildlife would fix an industry built on confinement, movement, trade and constant human control. As Nigel Palmer from the Badger Trust put it: “You can’t solve a disease in one animal by killing another animal.”
Exactly.
Defra’s own figures show only 5% of tested badger carcasses were positive for TB in 2024. Yet badgers have spent years being treated as a disposable obstacle to be managed out of the way.
The farming lobby is already complaining. Of course it is. The animal-use industries are experts at demanding the bodies of others whenever their own systems fail.
This is good news for badgers.
But cautious celebration matters because one licence still technically exists in Cumbria, and killing wildlife must not be repackaged, paused, renamed or quietly resumed.
The lesson should be simple.
Stop scapegoating wild animals.
Stop treating killing as policy.
Leave badgers alone.