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Killing is contentious. Even if it can save lives. Killing wild-life to save domestic livestock-life provokes its own un-ease. Whatever one’s predilections, it’s good to have the facts. Costs of disease, of culling, an ability to trade, public sentiment, all require evidence in order to sanction action. To be seen like a state, to be seen to be doing the right thing, is important. ‘A proper experimental assessment is the only way to test rigorously the effectiveness (and cost-effectiveness) of different strategies and to provide a sound basis for future policy’.
Ten years, 3000km2 of English countryside, randomized control trials. Killing badgers (who can transmit tuberculosis to cattle) across three areas, using two forms of cull and one area of no treatment – gold standard, you could say. Testing cattle. What works? Comparing different treatment and non-treatment areas. Complex mathematical models and equations to account for signal and noise. Explaining disappointments (the effects of culls were less than expected, and even counter productive as badgers ranged more widely as their numbers decreased and territories were disrupted).
And the evidence? Unclear. The independent (what else?) scientific group in charge concluded that there was little evidence that culls made a sizable difference. ‘Badger culling can make no meaningful contribution to cattle TB control in Britain’. The Chief Scientist was less sure – culling was still the best option available “to reduce the reservoir of infection”. The (then Labour) environmental minister unmoved, we should try vaccinating. Forward wind, and a new Conservative-led government reversed the no blame verdict. Culls would commence in new trial areas and have by now been rolled out across England. The killing continues, sometimes with public outrage at the lack of compassion, and the still questionable evidence that badgers are causes and not effects of an impoverished rural landscape. In Wales, meanwhile, the devolved administration stuck to trialling vaccines – though with unclear results too.
What does this mean for the gold standard of evidence based policy? ‘Gold standard’ suggests immutability, a clean transfer of fact-based truth, and a timeless value. It implies an ability to stand outside the rise and falls of markets, fashions and spurious interpretation. But this evidence has been anything other than solid. It has been hard, yes, and difficult, as befits a multifactorial environmental health issue. So much so that in the disease control world, ministers have had enough of science. It slows things down, fails to furnish the state with incontrovertible results and is too open to interpretation and debate. Interpretations involve translation, require subjects to be in the middle or the milieu of meaning where every translation is also a transformation. The scaled-upRCT did not allow us to eliminate the swash and swirl of politics. It did not adjudicate, or bypass politics with truth. Instead it made the politic seven more visible. Perhaps that is its saving grace.
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