How many badgers are there in ireland

The Irish Wildlife Trust opposes the use of badger culling as a technique for Bovine Tuberculosis management in Ireland. We have been campaigning in this area for a over a decade, calling for a stop to the wide scale badger culling being carried out by The Dept of Agriculture in Ireland.

See details of some of our work below. Bovine TB imposes significant economic costs every year on the Irish beef and dairy industry. A national bovine tuberculosis eradication programme was introduced in This reduction was achieved due to the introduction of measures such as testing and tighter controls on cattle movements.

However in progress stalled and the incidence of TB in the national herd has remained at virtually the same level ever since.

Figures from DAFM show that 6, badgers were snared and shot in — a pattern which has continued since culling was introduced in the late s. To date no scientific evidence has been produced which shows that badgers are responsible for the high levels of TB to be found in Ireland and the main source of this disease in cattle is other cattle. This important fact seems to have been forgotten by policy makers in the nearly 30 years that culling has been going on. Lugnaquillia, is enveloped by cloud in the backround.

Although surrounded by granite mountains, the summit is formed of mica schist. Richard Nairn. Some badger setts are shared with foxes, which may even breed in an active main sett. But a more common refuge is in conifer plantations - and, increasingly, in urban parks and gardens.

A century ago, foxes were so scarce in some parts of the Irish countryside that they were imported from Britain to provide quarry for fox-hunts. But numbers are now estimated at upwards of , - this despite the export of up to 35, fox pelts a year during the s and s - and few areas of the island remain unvisited by the animal. Its diet varies widely, from earthworms and blackberries to rabbits and young hares, and the hedgerows contribute fledgling birds and the small mammals drawn to thick cover, such as rats and wood mice.

These also attract the stoat, which may den in empty rat burrows or crevices in stone walls. While rabbits may sometimes make up half the stoat's food, it can also spend much of its hunting time up trees, stalking birds and nestlings. For all of Ireland carnivorous predators, the absence of the field vole which never reached here from Britain has encouraged a readiness to eat almost any prey that is encountered, including insects and invertebrates.

Our tiniest hedgerow mammal, the pygmy shrew , eats its own weight of insects every day and is itself killed but rarely eaten by foxes. For barn owls, however, it is a favourite prey, hunted in the woods and along roadsides. River banks have been largely ignored as wildlife corridors, but their ecological importance is now clear. In older hill forests, conifers were planted right to the edge of streams, robbing them of sunlight and of the wind-blown mineral and organic debris that supplied much of their nutrients.

Now the banks are left open and a more normal fringe of vegetation acts as a buffer to the run-off of forestry fertiliser. In the lowlands, the banks of some important trout and salmon streams are being planted with native trees, such as willow, as part of river rehabilitation schemes. Insects are important as food for fish, and the willow is host to more insects and mites than almost any other Irish tree. The role of the badger as a constraint to the eradication of bovine TB M bovis was identified in these islands in the late s and s by scientists here, in Britain and in New Zealand.

Following the refusal of farmers in east Co Offaly in to allow their cattle be slaughtered unless the badgers were also killed, an extensive cull of badgers took place in the area. A total of 1, badgers were removed, 1, from the project area and the remainder from a buffer zone.

Some 11 per cent of the badgers were found to have tuberculosis in the study, which began in By , scientists had ascertained that that the number of cattle failing the tuberculin test had dropped by 92 per cent in the project area and by 49 per cent in the control area. This sparked an instant demand from the farming community for more of the same in areas of the country where the disease levels were high.

Four more target areas were selected - Co Cork, Co Donegal, Co Kilkenny and Co Monaghan - for the Offaly-style treatment, and from September 1st, , to the end of August , 2, badgers were removed and were found to have a 19 per cent level of tuberculosis.

Across the State, when outbreaks of the disease occurred, badgers were systematically killed around the infected farms. Thousands more were killed illegally. Farmers were known to have pumped slurry into the underground setts to rid their lands of the badger. In the s badgers shot by farmers were dumped on roadways where they looked like roadkills.

Wildlife groups were particularly upset at the use of snares by the Department of Agriculture and Food in the capture of the animals and at the agreement between the Department and the farmers to appoint 75 full-time staff to control badgers three years ago. Among those opposing the cull programme is Dublin zoology graduate Mark Stephens, who has been questioning the route being taken by the department. We have to look at all other causes [of TB] as well," he said.