Update | Help stop badger culling adding to England’s Biodiversity catastrophe

Excellent news from the desk of one of the UK’s busiest ecologists – Tom Langton. Tom was recently given permission (after much pushback from Defra), to challenge the so-called ‘badger cull’ in the High Court and set up a crowdfunder. After a slow start the fund raising is going really well, and the challenge has been moved forward because of the government’s plans to move forward with the supplementary killing of protected animals across large areas of the country.

And the bit about England’s ‘biodiversity catastrophe’? Astonishingly for all our self-congratulations about being a ‘country of animal lovers’, we have lost so many of our animals (and plants) that the UK as a whole is one of the most nature-depleted countries n the world and a recent report from the RSPB, using data compiled by the Natural History Museum, published ahead of last week’s G7 Summit, found that the UK is the worst nation in the G7 for the volume of wildlife and wild spaces lost due to human activity (see – Biodiversity? The UK is losing it fast)..

Which is yet another reason why we need to be protecting what is left of our biodiversity, not slaughtering one of our last wild predatory mammals to placate dairy industry lobbyists.

If you’d like to donate to Tom’s crowdfunding efforts, please go to Help stop badger culling adding to England’s Biodiversity catastrophe.

 

Dear friends of the badgers,

Huge personal thanks to you for helping get the appeal to half way, and if you did (and please, please do!), for telling others about it. The really good news is that the case has been expedited by the courts to next month, just 40 or so days to go. 

The government legal department worked extremely hard to try to block the case being heard until after the issues of intensive cull licences this September. This of course would have meant that it would be too late to have any bearing on this year’s badger culling licences in the further roll-out of the horrendous badger culling policy. They failed thanks to smart work by our legal team and the case will go ahead straight away.

Do share our appeal as much as you can – we know that the majority of our population cares about the future of our wildlife and hates what they see happening to badgers. If we reach just a fraction of them, the target should be achieved.

Please accept my apology if you have had multiple emails arriving, which has been a glitch in the system that is hopefully now resolved.

With all good wishes, Tom

Tom Langton