Badger culling and bovine TB

Last reviewed 25 August 2026. This page reports what each government does and what each side says, with sources and dates. It reaches no conclusion, and nothing here should be read as one.

What the argument is about

Bovine tuberculosis is a disease of cattle that also occurs in badgers, and the question in dispute is how much badger-to-cattle transmission contributes to herd breakdowns and whether reducing badger numbers reduces those breakdowns enough to justify it. That question has been studied across several large trials over four decades, and the results are read differently by people who have read all of them. This page does not adjudicate it.

The four nations are moving in four different directions

This is the striking fact and it is recent. As at the review date above:

• England is ending its cull. On 30 August 2024 the government announced a TB eradication package that it said would allow it to end the badger cull by the end of the parliament. Defra states that 2025 was the final year of industry-led culling in the High Risk and Edge Areas and that all supplementary badger control licences have now ended. Natural England says it continues to determine existing licences until the new measures are in place.
• Wales has committed not to cull. Its bovine TB programme rests on cattle measures and badger vaccination, with a Badger Vaccination Grant scheme. That is not a complete prohibition on killing badgers: on farms with chronic breakdowns where badgers are considered to be contributing to disease persistence, licences permit trapping and testing, and badgers testing positive are humanely killed. The Welsh Government has said it is phasing that work out to concentrate resources on vaccination.
• Scotland has no programme. No bovine TB badger control programme has been identified; licensing under the 1992 Act relates to development and similar purposes.
• Northern Ireland is introducing one. A bovine TB eradication strategy announced in the Assembly on 24 March 2022 includes non-selective badger culling in areas of higher than average badger social group density and prolonged high levels of herd breakdown. DAERA has consulted on the options: non-selective culling, selective culling through Test and Vaccinate or Remove, and vaccination only.

What replaces culling in England

The strategy announced on 30 August 2024 sets out a Badger Vaccinator Field Force to expand badger vaccination, a national wildlife surveillance programme to establish TB prevalence in badgers, the first major badger population survey since 2011–13 — which is also the first measurement of what culling did to the population — and field trials of a cattle vaccine.

Test and Vaccinate or Remove

Northern Ireland ran a five-year TVR research project from 2014 in a 100km² area, in which trapped badgers were tested at the trap side, negative animals vaccinated and released, and positive animals removed. It sits between culling and vaccination and is one of the three options DAERA consulted on.

What each side says

Both positions are set out here at the same length, from what each publishes.

• Farming and government bodies licensing or supporting culling argue that badgers are a reservoir of infection that cattle measures alone cannot address, that herd breakdowns impose severe financial and personal costs on farmers, and that culling has been accompanied by reductions in incidence in cull areas.
• Wildlife organisations opposing culling argue that the reductions attributed to culling are within the range explicable by the cattle measures applied at the same time, that culling disperses badgers and can spread infection, and that vaccination and cattle-side controls achieve the same end without killing a protected species.

Both of those are summaries of published positions rather than findings. Where they conflict, that conflict is the current state of the argument and not something this page resolves. Read the primary documents linked above and reach your own view.