AN ANIMAL charity near Highbridge has hit out at the Government’s decision to resume the culling of badgers in Somerset and Gloucestershire.

Secret World, based in East Huntspill, is concerned for the badgers’ welfare, claiming that up to 22.8% of the animals in the 2013 cull suffered, taking longer than five minutes to die from gunshot wounds. This has caused welfare groups and scientists to condemn the cull as inhumane.

Staff at the rescue centre say that despite the evidence of the Independent Expert Panel (IEP) showing that the 2013 cull was both ineffective and inhumane, up to 1849 badgers will be shot in the countryside over the next few weeks.

They say the suffering of individual animals was best illustrated by ‘Badger 200’ a shot badger from the 2013 Somerset cull area which was brought to the centre and independently examined by a specialist veterinary pathologist. This animal had been shot in the spine rather than in the ‘target’ chest area and endured a painful death.

A spokesman said: “The decision to restart the badger cull ignores both scientific evidence and public opinion.

Even Defra’s own figures suggest that to have any positive impact on bovine TB incidence, 70% of the badger population must be killed during a six week period. In the 2013 cull, despite extensive resources and finance, only 48.1% of the target figure was achieved in Somerset and 39.1% in Gloucestershire, making the cull ineffective and likely to have worsened TB incidence in cattle by the perturbation effect.

“A complex ‘guesstimate’ of the badger population size has been made, so it will be impossible to know the true proportion of the badger population killed, making both the effectiveness of the cull and damage to the local badger population indeterminable.

“A most serious concern is that there will be no independent analysis of the 2014 cull. This decision has been heavily criticised by scientists, the veterinary profession, and former members of the IEP. Secret World is seriously concerned that the conduct of the cull and welfare of shot badgers, many of which will not die instantaneously, will not be objectively assessed.”