Professor Rosie Woodruff
speaker
23 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2013
last heard Aug 2013
Professor Rosie Woodruff’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
To be confident of killing 70% of the badgers in an area, you have to know how many badgers there are.
But as it turns out, counting badgers is really difficult.
If you want to count some conspicuous animal like elephants or giraffes, you can fly around in an aeroplane, look out the window and count how many you see.
But badgers only come out at night.
They're difficult to see.
They all look the same.
And it takes skill to tell which burrows you see in the field are being used by badgers, which are being used by other animals like foxes and rabbits.
And then each family group of badgers is going to be using more than one of those sets.
So it's not straightforward to work out how many badgers there are in a particular piece of land.
So the government's best estimate of the number of badgers in West Gloucestershire is 3,399.
In West Somerset, where culling has already started, is 2,494.
But there's a great deal of uncertainty around those numbers.
So, for example, the government's only about 60% certain that the true number of badges in that West Somerset area lies between 1,972
and 2,973.
Between about 2,000 and 3,000, that's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
Because killing too few badgers risks making cattle TB worse, what the government's done is to err on the side of caution.
So because in West Somerset they think there could be
Nearly 3,000 badgers.
Natural England is referring farmers to kill just over 2,000 of those badgers there.
Showing 1–20 of 23 · page 1 of 2
Next →