Can the government's chief scientific adviser (The Herald, October 23) explain why, if badgers are the main source of TB infection in cattle, there are cattle with TB on the Isle of Man, where there are no badgers? Or how, if badgers and other wild animals are the source, France manages to have badgers and wild boar without a TB epidemic among cattle?
The source of the TB infection is cattle, because of the poor conditions in which many farmers keep them. When people are left to live in unsanitary and crowded conditions and are poorly fed - as many were in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and as the homeless are now - TB was and is rife. The same goes for cattle.
Badgers are an endangered species. Cattle are not. When will the government stop pandering to the backward views of what has become mostly an industry of large farms treating domesticated animals and the public as merely a source of profit and endangered species as an impediment to money-making?
Duncan McFarlane,Beanshields, Braidwood, Carluke.
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