(“Faced with cull choice”, Tivy-side January 5th) suggest that we look at a badger culling trial from 1970 – years before I was born – when there are far more recent and thorough studies?

Perhaps it is not those opposed to the cull who ignore inconvenient evidence, as he suggests? On www.pembrokeshireagainstthecull.org.uk he would find links to more modern reports, including the 2007 conclusion of the Independent Scientific Group on Cattle TB which clearly rejected badger culling as at best an expensive and inefficient means of reducing cattle infection, and one which risks spreading the disease. Instead they recommended cattle-based measures such as eradicated the last, more severe TB outbreak. Or he might prefer the 2009 Farmer's Guardian interview with Dr Robbie McDonald, head of FERA's Wildlife and Emerging Diseases programme, stating that he “is adamant culling badgers will make bTB worse and that farmers need to start backing the vaccination programme.” Better to rely on unproven but promising vaccines than tested and rejected measures like badger culls!

Further, badger culling was tested solely as a means of reducing TB in cattle. If we want to eradicate TB entirely, then we must also control infection in badgers and we know that a non-selective cull will significantly increase the prevalence of TB in the badger population.

The only technique we have to reduce TB in badgers is vaccination, either the injection being used in England this year or the oral vaccine being trialled in Ireland. As Wyn Lewis rightly points out, vaccination will not cure an infected badger, so a cull that will spread TB in the badger population will only prolong the eradication of the wildlife TB reservoir once the vaccines are licensed.

To eliminate bovine TB in Wales we need a science-based strategy using all the new tools available to us, not a knee-jerk lashing out at the easy, traditional scapegoat (scapebadger?) Dr Gavin Wheeler Llwyngoras Felindre Crymych