Tory MP calls for ‘all wild animals’ to be culled

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A Conservative MP has referred to as for all wild animals to be culled.

Richard Drax (South Dorset) dismissed calls by animal rights activists and conservation teams to finish the badger cull and as an alternative steered extra animals, equivalent to deer and foxes, must also be culled.

Mr Drax had earlier raised the case of “a beaver being released illegally… in west Dorset”.

According to the Badger Trust, greater than 210,000 badgers have been killed for the reason that cull started in England in 2013 in an effort to deal with bovine tuberculosis (TB).

Mr Drax mentioned TB was a “major problem” within the South West, telling a Commons debate on farming: “Culling has proved to work, and can I suggest that rather than talking about stopping culling on badgers and to introduce some other form, that all wild animals have to be culled.

“Because if they don’t their health deteriorates. They don’t have any predators in today’s world. Foxes, deer, badgers. We don’t want to wipe them out, we just simply want them controlled.

“This is just pure common sense.”

He mentioned: “There is no sense, in our view, in reintroducing beavers into small chalk streams, or any other form of stream in Dorset. Beavers dam rivers, they would then be protected no doubt by every organisation that would want it protected, farmland then floods.

“Beavers don’t hang around and say ‘this is my home’, as has been proved in Scotland – they breed and move elsewhere and do the same in other rivers. And, as I understand it, in Scotland they’ve had to be culled because they’ve broken out of the area that was initially given to them.

“Can the Government please look at not only the illegal releasing of beavers into rivers – if indeed this is the case and that hasn’t been proven as yet – but certainly to the legal release and this emphasis on rewilding which, while we all want to see wild animals, there is a proper place and location for each of the various species.”

It comes as beavers are to make a comeback in London for the primary time since they have been hunted to extinction 400 years in the past.

The beavers will be launched in Ealing’s Paradise Fields, an eight-hectare web site of woodland and wetlands minutes from Greenford Tube station.

At least one male and one feminine beaver will be launched as a part of the venture, which is designed to defend towards city flooding and create numerous wetland habitats.

The venture will mark the primary time beavers have been launched to an city space within the UK.