How can I restrict contact between badgers and cattle?
To limit the risk of infection from infectious badgers it is important to:
- Ensure badgers cannot get access to areas where cattle are housed and especially that they cannot access feed stores or silage clamps (especially maize silage).
- Ensure cattle cannot get access to badger setts and latrines.
Practical measures to help achieve these include the following:
- Ensure that sides of buildings are solid and smooth and at least 1.5 metres high.
- Ensure that gaps at the sides and bottoms of doors are less than 7.5 cm.
- Keep meal in secure bins or silos.
- Avoid meal spills – if this happens clean it up to avoid attracting badgers into yards.
- Consider using electric fencing to exclude badgers from farm yard areas. A combination of four strands of fencing at 10cm, 15cm, 20cm and 30cm has been shown to effectively exclude badgers. [Note fencing should not exclude badger access to setts].
- Identify badger setts and latrines, and where possible fence these off a minimum of 4m away from badger activity eg using normal electric fencing at 80 cm, so that cattle cannot get access to them.
- Only set out meal for cattle that will be consumed that day ie avoid meal being left overnight which could attract badgers.
- Raise feed troughs and mineral licks off the ground to make them less accessible to badgers.
- Use mains water for cattle if possible and raise drinkers to limit badger access.
Taking action to improve farm biosecurity and reduce the risks of an outbreak will have benefits that should outweigh the costs.