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The news that Britain was free of bovine TB in 1960 was touted as one of the great achievements of postwar British agriculture.
When the disease re-emerged in Gloucestershire and Cornwall in 1971, rudimentary research by the ministry of agriculture was quick to lay the blame on badgers. "Brock" was a reservoir for a disease that could lay dormant for many years but made fast progress once passed to cattle.
At Nature Conservancy, the state research agency tasked with providing advice on environmental matters, alarm bells rang. Evidence that badgers were the crucial vector was "somewhat flyblown" and it feared farmers, roused by sensational press reports, would commence a mass — and illegal — slaughter.
At this stage, the scientists were more likely to think the disease had passed from cattle to badgers and even entertained the thought that the farmers themselves were the principle carriers, but they accepted that badgers would need to be destroyed and tested where there was evidence of infected badgers and cattle in the same locality.
A year later, Nature Conservancy was satisfied it had averted "a pogrom against the badger" and even the ministry of agriculture was inclined to attribute an outbreak in West Penrith in Cornwall to poor "husbandry and management practices".
Local press and the farmers did not keep quiet for long. In April 1973, a Cornish "action group" demanding the extermination of badgers saw local MPs come banging on the door of the ministry. New legislation allowing authorised persons to conduct culls followed, generating an outcry against the return of "badger baiting".
Animal welfare groups were further outraged when the ministry demonstrated how to use snares and Nature Conservancy, recognising political realities, urged gassing setts instead, which was considered humane by animal welfare organisations.
Legislation duly followed and by November 1976 fifty-nine operations had been carried out in Avon, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Devon and Cornwall. Logistical problems abounded and not all branches of government proved cooperative.
The Ministry of Defence, for instance, brusquely explained that setts on their Lulworth Range in Dorset could not be gassed because it would take at least 10 years to clear unexploded projectiles – and anyway their firing programme was too tight.
The new permissive environment carried further dangers. In 1977 the local water authority sought permission to gas badgers that had damaged levees on the river Severn while the ministry felt moved to remind blood sports organisations that killing badgers was still illegal.
Government policy was widely criticised in specialist periodicals. For example, an article in the New Scientist claimed the "statistical stockade which has been erected to protect the policy of badger slaughter would embarrass an innumerate recruit to a kindergarten".
All sorts of theories were aired in the national press. Were rats or deer carriers? Had the carcasses of slaughtered cattle left to rot on Dartmoor polluted the water supply, becoming the source of new infections to cattle and badger alike? Did selective culling disrupt badger social groupings and territories, causing the stress that could activate the disease and the movement that would ensure its spread? And in a culture increasingly sensitive to the memory of the Nazi holocaust, gassing innocent animals was bound to provoke impassioned responses.
Government policy was a mess. It had not been proved that badgers were the crucial vector and resource-strapped scientists trying to figure out what was happening could not yet provide the basis for a systematic programme of disease eradication.
Peter Walker, the incoming minister of agriculture in 1979, bowed to public pressure and called a moratorium on gassing. Lord Zuckerman’s report on Badgers, Cattle and Tuberculosis (August 1980) loftily accepted that the precautionary principle should preside, advising that the programme be resumed where there were new outbreaks. His battery of recommendations insisted on greater openness and called for more scientific research. Zuckerman also thought the men from the ministry heading off into the English countryside with their cylinders of cyanide gas needed to draw more fully on the expertise of the "Chemical Defence Establishment".
The Nature Conservancy council remained frustrated by the ministry of agriculture’s refusal to consult properly, its secretiveness, disregard for the scientific evidence and weakness in the face of pressure from the agricultural community, be it the National Farmers’ Union or the Country Landowners’ Association. In the mid-1970s, it had found the ministry "totally unhelpful and irresponsible", the level of co-operation "little short of disgraceful".
Looking back is to be struck by the rapidity with which the farming community latched onto the need to kill badgers, the ad-hoc and unsystematic nature of the government’s response, and the deeply troubled relationship between scientific understanding and policy formation.
• Matthew Kelly’s history of modern Dartmoor will be published by Jonathan Cape in June 2015. He teaches history at the University of Southampton. The detail in this piece is taken from the following run of files in the National Archive, Kew: FT 41/88-95.
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