The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3005 by Angharad Copyright© 2016 Angharad

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This is a work of fiction any mention of real people, places or institutions is purely coincidental and does not imply that they are as suggested in the story.
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“Hush,” I shouted at the breakfast table, “this is important,” the radio news suddenly had something of interest to me. Mutters and whispers I met with a stony stare but I heard the news story.

Professor Rosie Woodroffe from the Zoological Society of London, had led a team which demonstrated that the idea that badgers gave tuberculosis to cattle from close contact was erroneous and that the way the infection spread between the two species was by urine and faeces. While this showed the badger wasn’t swapping spit with cattle as farmers would almost have you believe, infecting their cattle as an act of spite, it demonstrated that the whole problem needed more research and new approaches to overcome the infection spread.

The bad news was the team showed that the bacillus could remain active in the ground for long periods possibly years. As badgers will root about under cowpats for earthworms and other invertebrates, might this be part of how they caught the disease from infected cattle?

The world is crazy, we all know that, but it seems to become worse as time goes by. Back in 2006 the same scientist led a team which demonstrated that shooting badgers as a cull was making things worse. I remember reading the paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology and thinking it would stop the cull, but no, this idiot government went ahead and slaughtered loads of badgers which were shot by supposed marksman. It cost a great deal of money and spread the disease more than in areas where no cull was held.

Badgers are territorial and if you remove large numbers of them from an area, the area will soon be infiltrated by badgers from neighbouring ones. Some are likely to be infected with TB which they can then transmit to the cattle by urine and faeces, or catch from the cattle by the same vectors.

So the badger cull doesn’t work but this government who are trying to keep the National Farmer’s Union on board, order it to be extended. Usually, if you’re in a hole the advice is to stop digging. In the case of the UK government, they get in a hole and send for an earth mover. The degree of stupidity is unbelievable, or would be were it anything other than national or local government. Even the banks aren’t that stupid—I think, but I won’t ask Simon to confirm it because he may be embarrassed or worse he might make me embarrassed.

The government are about to start the cull again now at anytime even though they know, because there is scientific evidence to prove it, that it won’t work and will probably make things worse. It makes the mind boggle, poor old brock is made the scapegoat for poor hygiene in farming practice, also the slurry from the infected animals may well be spread all over the farm before the animals show as sick.

Also you get farmers complaining that they can’t bury the slaughtered, infected animals on the farm because it’s cheaper. The animals are slaughtered and the bodies burned or disposed of to minimise further infection.

Mind you it must be awful to spend years building up a herd of cows for them to become infected and then all destroyed, especially for the cows concerned, whose deaths are actually pointless when there are vaccines that could be used to stop the disease. However this means they give false positives when routine testing is done, so instead of shooting badgers perhaps they need to develop a test to show the positive is from a vaccine and the animal is healthy.

I left soon after breakfast to do some more work on the project on hibernating dormice. I cancelled all my meetings and browsed the university’s library catalogue. I also browsed some other university catalogues and compiled a list of papers I wanted to read on the subject. This may save us time or give us ideas about how we do or don’t run our project and possibly prevent us reinventing the wheel unless we’re doing confirmatory work—which isn’t what we’re supposed to be doing, unless we find something they missed—which is unlikely.

Diane took the list when she brought in some more tea. She’ll get the library to lookout the ones I want and order from elsewhere the ones they don’t have. For a short time it made me feel like an undergrad again and that made my heart quicken for a moment or two. I actually enjoyed researching when I was a student, now I tend to ask a student to do it for me which is a mixed blessing. Some are good at it, some are hopeless at it and some are hopeless full stop.

Daddy invited me to go to lunch with him to which I agreed. Naturally he asked me how things were proceeding and I told him we were still engaged in a literature search.

“I thocht ye’d done that.”

“Still working through it, don’t want to replicate other people’s work do we? Nor do we want to repeat something which didn’t work the first time round.”

“That sounds as if ye’re daein’ the research yersel’.”

“Some of it, I’m almost as happy in a library as I am out in the field.” He hadn’t heard the news story about the way bovine TB is spread.

“Ye missed a great opportunity there.”

“What studying the spread of TB in cattle and badgers?”

“Aye, always some money available from Defra f’ it.”

“Yes but we’d be up against people like Rosie Woodroffe and she’s light years ahead of most places on most things but the bloody government doesn’t take any notice even though much of the time she’s being paid by them.”

“Och, they’re a bunch of imbeciles but they should understand the word faeces because they dae it often enough. They should also understand the word or phrase, piss because they regularly take it.” I couldn’t fault his logic.

I finished my tuna jacket potato. I have tried ordering a tuna trousers potato and it usually confuses the hell out of the waiting staff who seem unable to appreciate when someone is joking—probably because they’re all foreigners and British humour is somewhat unique. But then the number of times I’ve been in the Body Shop and asked if they had any new bodies for sale and the assistants seem irritated by it. I suppose if you’re asked twice an hour most days, it wears somewhat thin.

My afternoon was Diane’s revenge for me sending her off to the library, I ended up signing all sorts of letters and reports including the ones to students we considered were wasting their time and ours as well. I mentioned this the other day when we had the meeting to confirm the list or find mitigating circumstances. I don’t like to lose students but I like even less students who don’t want to work. Their education costs a great deal of money and they may not get another chance to go to university, so those that waste the opportunity annoy me, especially as we have a waiting list of students who failed our entry requirements but only just.