The policy of culling badgers to reduce bovine tuberculosis in cattle raises significant welfare concerns due to the scale of killing, wounding rates, and efficacy questions.
Large-scale badger culling causes substantial acute welfare harm through shooting mortality and wounding. A wounding rate of 18 percent in early culling operations means that for every five badgers shot, approximately one was wounded but not killed immediately, facing suffering from injury before death. At the scale of hundreds of thousands of badgers culled, this translates to tens of thousands of animals experiencing prolonged suffering from wounding. The contested efficacy of culling compared to cattle-based interventions and badger vaccination makes this welfare harm particularly concerning from a cost-benefit perspective.