The Isle of Man’s cattle population, mercifully, remains free of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) – one of the advantages of being on a relatively small island with strict border controls for livestock imports.

Jeremy Clarkson, on the other hand, is less fortunate.

The UK’s most famous farmer announced recently that one, possibly more, of the cows on his farm had tested positive for bTB and would need to be slaughtered.

Mr Clarkson has been a long-time advocate for the culling of badgers as the most effective way to prevent the spread of bTB, and his recent losses will undoubtedly re-ignite the debate over such culling.

It’s been over a year since the English government announced that it was implementing a new strategy to control bTB, one that would aim to eradicate all culling by 2029. Instead, the plan is to vaccinate both badgers and livestock.

According to English government statistics, over the past decade almost 330,000 cattle have been compulsorily slaughtered as a result of bTB, and more than 230,000 badgers have been killed (mostly trapped and shot) in efforts to control the disease; and it costs the British taxpayer more than £100m every year to deal with bTB outbreaks.

It is clear, then, that the current strategy hasn’t worked. But could it ever have been a robust solution when the only way to effectively prevent badgers spreading bTB is to kill every badger?

Eradicating or reducing the badger population in one area may temporarily suppress the incidence of bTB there, but it will also encourage badgers to migrate (called perturbation), thus spreading disease further.

Another factor is that bTB can be spread by wild mammals other than badgers – in particular, deer.

Scientific evidence is weak both in relation to badger population figures (there’s been no attempt to formally record these for more than a decade) and the impact of culling.

And whilst badger ‘supporters’ and farmers’ representatives like the National Farmers Union disagree about most aspects of the cull, what is commonly accepted is that cattle are very good at spreading disease between each other.

England’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) estimates that 50% of herd outbreaks are due to the movement between farms of infected cattle, who spread bTB through both bodily contact and through infected urine and slurry.

The RSPCA goes further, and estimates that badgers are responsible for just 5% of bTB in cattle, and it advocates for investment and research into bTB testing and vaccination in cattle as the best way forward.

So, what progress has been made since August 2024 and the announcement of the new strategy?

DEFRA issued a statement in June 2025 that said it was starting to survey the badger population and that a first round of field work had been undertaken, with more to follow later in 2025.

It also stated that field trials for cattle vaccination were in progress, and cattle keepers who are interested in taking part are being encouraged to sign up.

Whilst tens of thousands of badgers are still being culled under existing five-year licences, mainly in South West England and the Midlands, DEFRA has stated that badger vaccinations have increased and that in the last year a total of 4,110 badgers were vaccinated, an increase of more than 1,000 since 2023.

Slow progress, albeit a step in the right direction, with the (perhaps overly) ambitious vision that a ‘badger vaccination force field’ will come into place next year.

In addition, projects supporting farmers to carry out badger vaccinations themselves are set to launch later this year … so, let’s see if the influential Mr Clarkson can be persuaded to take part.

You may well wonder what this has to do with the Isle of Man, where we don’t have badgers, but the reduction of diseases of any kind in the UK lessens the chances of them spreading across the Irish Sea. It’s in all of our interests, not just badgers’, that bTB is better managed and contained.