Badger vaccination against bovine tuberculosis offers a humane alternative to lethal culling, with accumulating evidence of comparable effectiveness and far lower welfare impact.
Badger vaccination represents one of the clearest examples in wildlife management where a humane alternative to lethal control has been developed and validated. Cage-trapping for vaccination causes genuine acute distress, but the animal is released unharmed after injection and quickly returns to its territory. The welfare outcome is immeasurably better than lethal culling methods that cause slow deaths in a proportion of shot animals. The accumulating evidence that vaccination achieves comparable TB reduction to culling in appropriately designed programmes removes the primary scientific justification for prioritising lethal control.