The e-petition on the Government’s website that has attracted the largest number of votes ever is the one urging the Government to think again about the proposed badger cull as a means of controlling the spread of TB.

At the time of writing this, 259,197 people have challenged the decision, made two years ago, to cull 70 per cent of badgers in two test areas. Given the nature and importance of many other e-petitions that have attracted fewer supporters, it is clear that the public are really not happy about the plan to speculatively slaughter our wildlife on flimsy evidence.

This decision to cull was announced four years after The Independent Scientific Group on Cattle TB reported that “culling Badgers would have no meaningful effect on bovine TB in cattle” after they culled nearly 10,000 badgers and systematically gathered evidence of the effect of so doing.

TB is a nasty disease. My brother contracted it in his early teens and lost a year and half of irreplaceable learning time at school. Our hearts go out to farmers who lose their livelihood because of it. Before we cull more of our indigenous wildlife, we should be relying on evidence much stronger than we currently have to justify such drastic action.

The main problem, it appears, is that EU law prevents the UK from setting up a vaccination programme. The reason for the EU prohibition, interference with the skin test for contracted TB, is arguably no longer valid as a different test could be used on vaccinated cattle. DEFRA claims that it would take five years to change the EU ban.

But if they had started to try to do so years ago, it could have been changed by now. And vaccination is not necessarily a more expensive option than culling, as has been frequently suggested.

It is becoming clear that the relative costs of both courses of action are very similar, but vaccination has the advantage of being in harmony with the public’s wishes and would also not need policing. It has already been demonstrated in Wales and elsewhere that the public are willing to contribute to vaccination schemes that would benefit farmers, as well as wildlife. Mine is not an anti-farmer stance, it is a pro-sense one. The same amount of energy spent sorting out the vaccination issue would be much more productive and countryside friendly.