The badger cull policy in England to reduce bovine tuberculosis is highly contested. The welfare costs for badgers are documented while the disease control benefits remain debated.
Badger culling welfare involves both direct welfare harms to culled badgers and policy questions about whether those harms are justified by disease control outcomes. The direct welfare costs are documented: cage trapping is stressful, and shooting accuracy rates mean some badgers are wounded without immediate death. The policy justification requires that culling achieves meaningful bovine TB reduction - a benefit that scientific review has found inconsistent. Wales's shift to vaccination-based control offers a welfare-positive alternative whose effectiveness evidence is accumulating. The contested science makes the badger cull one of the most active policy debates at the interface of wildlife welfare and agricultural disease management.