Bovine Tuberculosis: The Militant Scientific Article

Under cover of science and rigor, the article by Savoir Animal on bovine tuberculosis and badgers gives a biased image of the issue. By focusing solely on the health question, it leaves out everything that is inconvenient: damages, costs, and realities on the ground.

The article by Savoir Animal on bovine tuberculosis and the culling of badgers reads like a call to reason. Science finally rises against old archaic reflexes. You almost feel intelligent reading it. You join the camp of serious people.

Except that once the last line is read, you have the funny feeling that you have just visited a house where the doors leading to the cellar are still closed.

Because really, what does it say, this article? That science contests the culling of badgers in the fight against tuberculosis. Period. The reader leaves with the idea that the issue is settled, that all regulation is the result of peasant archaism.

Except that’s not true. It only talks about one angle. The health angle. And even then, with a selection of chosen works as if sorting through holiday photos: keeping the ones where everyone smiles, and discarding the rest.

There is the article, and there is the gaping hole right next to it. Not a word about ravaged crops. Nothing about torn-up embankments or collapsing dikes. Nothing about what it actually means for a person who gets up at five in the morning, sees their cornfield turned into a battlefield, and knows that the insurance won’t cover much. These people don’t write opinion pieces.

What ANSES Actually Says

And yet ANSES itself, which is readily brandished when convenient, states clearly: its report on bovine tuberculosis did not address damages to crops or infrastructure. It answered a specific question, within a specific framework. Health-related.

Because multiple official sources acknowledge the damages. In 2018, thirty-three departments signed decrees to authorize destruction: crops, roads, railways, dikes.

This reality, the article erases with a flick of the pen. Why? Because it tarnishes the narrative. A badger carrying a bacterium, that’s still debatable in activist circles. But a badger overturning a field, undermining an embankment, costing unreimbursed money, that smells of earth, diesel, and the bill. It smells of reality. And reality is rarely picturesque.

The Small Framing Deception

Once the topic is narrowed down to just tuberculosis, one can comfortably write that “science contests culling” as if everything were settled. As if the rest doesn’t exist. The shutters close, and it’s concluded that it’s night.

But still, this text deserves partial credit for starting on the right foot. Yes, scientific literature does not support defending any culling policy solely as a health imperative. Yes, British studies have shown the limitations of some destructions and ANSES itself points out that in France, bovine tuberculosis is part of a more complex multi-host system than just badgers. But the article, based on a real scientific nuance, constructs a binary reading of the subject. It replaces one excess with another.

Maintaining scientific rigor requires holding it to the end. To the end, it means recognizing that the badger is not just a bacterium carrier. It is also an animal that lives, digs, and damages. And public policies are also built on that: the constraints, the costs, and the people who toil.

The article by Savoir Animal takes a piece of the truth, politicizes it, and frames it nicely. And the reader who doesn’t know the motives behind prefectural decrees or an farmer’s bills gets carried away by the apparent logic of it all. That’s why criticism must hit the mark. The problem is not only what this article says about tuberculosis. It’s also what it doesn’t say.