Badger culling to control bovine tuberculosis is controversial. Scientific evidence on its effectiveness and the welfare cost to badgers inform the ongoing policy debate.
The badger cull debate encapsulates the tension between agricultural disease control and wildlife welfare. Individual badgers killed through free-shooting experience variable welfare outcomes depending on shot placement and speed of death. Wounded animals that escape die slowly. The scale of killing — hundreds of thousands of individual animals over years — represents a massive welfare impact regardless of disease control effectiveness. Scientific evidence that culling provides limited TB control benefit strengthens the case for welfare-sparing alternatives. Badger vaccination programmes are now available and are being scaled, offering a path to disease management that does not require killing large numbers of sentient wild mammals.