You know how Brian May is now an animal activist – specialising in badgers and the necessity or otherwise of culling them – as well as an astrophysicist and the guitarist with Queen? In case you didn’t, I’ll just allow you a moment to get yourself up to speed – OK? World recalibrated? Jolly good.
Well, Brian May: The Badgers, the Farmers and Me focusses, naturally, on the badgery portion of his career. May tells us he has never been convinced by the government’s assertion that the critters are responsible for the spread of bovine TB, which mandates the killing of any sick cattle – approximately 20,000 a year – with all the repercussions for the farmers that losing animals they care about involves.
The culling of the badgers itself, of course, has been going on for about 20 years. And never without controversy, because there have always been some calling for vaccinating rather than killing the animals (technically a protected species), but always with the backing of those most immediately affected: the farmers. About 200,000 badgers have been killed in the previous decade and combating the disease as a whole costs the taxpayer around £100m a year.
May feels that badgers cannot be the main source of transmission for bovine TB and sets out to prove it with the support of Anne Brummer, his co-founder of the animal protection charity the Save Me Trust, and large-animal vet Dave Sibley. May is such a calmly spoken, thoughtful man that as they begin their four-year inquiry into the matter on Robert Reed’s diseased property in Devon, many bits of surprising information practically go past without you noticing. Such as the fact that the TB tests the government compels cows to have are nonsense. They only identify roughly 50% of sick animals. The ostensibly healthy rest are consequently free to infect and reinfect others. Reed’s cows are given better tests and all the sick are detected.
But does infected mean infectious and if so, how? Yes, but only in dung, is the answer. Dung that is often spread on crops then consumed by cows, or on their grazing land or – get this – on the grazing land of other farmers’ cows. And the slugs and snails that share the land, they get eaten by badgers. Better hygienic measures are introduced at the farm, they maintain utilising the good tests and the herd becomes clear of disease.
The wider question of why it is being left to Queen’s guitarist and his buddies to undertake what looks to be a reasonably easy, if time-consuming, experiment is never explained. It is a film very light on detail, such as whether the more effectual tests are prohibitively expensive (it seems unlikely given the consequent costs of the crap ones, but we need to know one way or the other), and I would like to know whether it hasn’t always been a good idea to keep your cows’ food and water as free of slurry as possible. Also, when it is explained that cows cannot simply be vaccinated against the pathogen because then they would react as if infected and need to be slaughtered, you can’t help but wonder if this is not a deeply solvable problem of bureaucracy or if there is some scientific way to tell the immune from the infected?
Still, the film clearly performs the purpose May intends it to. And that is not to persuade everyone, immediately, of the utter righteousness of his anti-culling stance (he is far too equable for that) but to introduce doubt, possibility and space for considering that there might be a better way to help farmers and not destroy any more animals than we absolutely have to. It is so reasoned and rational that it feels like a revolutionary act.
Brian May: The Badgers, the Farmers and Me aired on BBC Two and is now on iPlayer.
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