Under the guise of science and thoroughness, the article by Savoir Animal on bovine tuberculosis and badgers gives a biased image of the issue. By focusing solely on the health aspect, it overlooks everything that is inconvenient: damages, costs, and real-life situations.
The Savoir Animal article on bovine tuberculosis and the culling of badgers reads like a call to reason. Science finally opposes outdated reflexes. You almost feel intelligent reading it. You join the camp of serious people.
However, once you’ve finished reading the last line, you get the funny feeling that you’ve just visited a house where the doors leading to the cellar are closed.
Because, what does this article really say? That science challenges the culling of badgers in the fight against tuberculosis. That’s it. The reader leaves with the idea that the issue is resolved, and any regulation is seen as peasant backwardness.
Except it’s not. It only discusses one aspect: health. And even then, with a selection of chosen works as carefully curated as vacation photos: keeping the ones where everyone smiles and discarding the rest.
There’s the article, and then there’s the gaping hole right next to it. Not a word about the ravaged crops. Nothing about the torn embankments or collapsing dykes. Nothing about what it actually means for someone who wakes up at five, whose cornfield turns into a battlefield, and who knows that insurance won’t cover much. These people don’t write op-eds.
What Anses actually says
And yet, Anses itself, usually cited when convenient, clearly states that their report on bovine tuberculosis did not address damages to crops or infrastructure. It focused on a specific question in a specific framework: health.
Because official sources acknowledge the damages. In 2018, thirty-three departments issued orders to allow destruction: crops, roads, railways, dykes.
The article brushes this reality aside with a stroke of the pen. Why? Because it tarnishes the narrative. A badger carrying a bacterium may still be debatable among activists. But a badger overturning a field, undermining an embankment, costing unreimbursed money – that smells of soil, diesel, and invoices. It smells of reality. And reality is rarely picturesque.
The small framing trick
By reducing the subject to just tuberculosis, one can casually write that “science challenges the culling” as if everything is settled. As if the rest doesn’t exist. The shutters close, and one concludes that it’s dark.
Yet, one must acknowledge a partially correct starting point for this text. Yes, scientific literature does not support any culling policy as a health imperative. Yes, British studies have shown the limits of some cullings, and Anses itself points out that bovine tuberculosis in France is part of a more complex multi-host system than just badgers. But from a genuine scientific nuance, the article creates a binary view of the subject. It replaces one excess with another.
Upholding scientific rigor means holding it until the end. Until the end, that means recognizing that the badger is not just a carrier of bacteria. It is also an animal that lives, digs, and damages. And public policies are built around that too: constraints, costs, and the hardworking people.
The article by Savoir Animal takes a part of the truth, politicizes it, and frames it nicely. And the reader, who may not know the motivations behind prefectural orders or an farmer’s bills, gets caught up in the apparent logic of it all. That’s why criticism must hit the mark. The problem is not just what this article says about tuberculosis. It’s also about what it doesn’t say.
