Just Do Something

It's not that often I get up on my soapbox - I personally feel very strongly about some things like not eating meat and not using cosmetics that have been tested on animals, but I get that other people feel differently, or care less, and so I try not to ram my beliefs down other people's throats - you're entitled to your opinions, even if I personally don't agree with them.

But yesterday I read a news story that has got me SO RILED, I'm literally taking to every social media platform I can to promote it's injustice and try to get more people aware of the issue and tackling it.

This article by the Guardian, Full-scale badger cull set to get government go ahead, covers the main points in great detail, in what I feel is a remarkably restrained unbiased way given that all the evidence of the independent decade long scientific trial shows that a cull is not an effective way to deal with the disease transmission.

The basic ideas are that bovine tb incidence, of which badgers are carriers, is incredibly high in certain areas of England (but not across the whole country which is where the cull is proposed to occur), but the research that has been done shows that killing the badgers doesn't really stop the spread of it, and can even increase it due to the disruption of the surviving badgers. So you would think it would be a no-brainer to consider some alternatives? Yeah, except the fact that the Conservative govenerment has cancelled 5 out of the 6 trials into the development of a vaccination (like what the Welsh government have decided to carry out, in place of a cull, yay Wales) that the last Labour government set up. So there is no real alternative at the moment, because they've done that.

The Environment Secretary, Owen Patterson, who may or may not actually be the devil (he's a climate change sceptic. Our environment secretary is a climate. Change. Sceptic. I weep, truely I weep), well, I don't really have words for him.

My favourite quote from the article?

"In an interview with the Farmers Guardian on Friday, Patterson appeared to cast the 

proposed cull as being of benefit to badgers: "I find the attitude of those who want these 

wonderful animals to die of this disgusting disease [bovine TB] completely 

incomprehensible.""

Oh yeah, my bad, I'm clearly the monster here for not wanting innocent, healthy animals to die unnecessarily. *insert expletives*

Don't get me wrong, I don't want any animals to die unnecessarily under any situation, and if a small scale cull was scientifically proven to be the best way of handling this, then I wouldn't like it, but I would understand why it was being done. This, this I can't understand. This, even more so than the piecemeal auction of our beloved NHS, the under taxed rich, and all the other hairbrained schemes the government have done to throw our country to the dogs, this is the thing that really makes me despair for humanity. I don't believe in God, but if I did, this is when I would start praying for their souls because my god if these bastards aren't going to hell then I don't know who is.

Please consider signing the petition to stop the cull, joining or donating to The Badger Trust, or even just tweeting about it to let more people know, you don't know what difference it might make. Thank you for listening to my rant,