WITH reference to your comment on page 12 of last week's Journal concerning Badger Trust Cymru and the Welsh Assembly's policy on badger culling.

You should remember that the Rural Affairs Minister Elin Jones said recently: "We believe that the most effective measure to address both sources of infection and cross infection would be a targeted cull of badgers in TB high incidence areas."

So where did she get that conclusion from? I would ask you to look at the conclusion of the only scientific study on Bovine TB, which took 10 years, cost millions of pounds and killed thousands of badgers.

The Independent Scientific Group in 2007 concluded this: "Our overall conclusion is that after careful consideration of all randomised badger culling trials and other data in this report, including an economic assessment, that badger culling cannot meaningfully contribute to the control of cattle TB in Britain."

So what more do you want? The scientists also stated that scientific experiments in the trial found that a way to make TB in cattle worse was to carry out small area badger cull experiments, or what the Assembly called "test"culls in Wales.

You can see that England at last has got the scientific message, but for some reason the Assembly seems to have totally missed it and still speaks of a badger cull as part of its TB eradication policy.

Also, are we allowed into the principle stakeholder groups to discuss the TB eradication programme the Assembly? No, we are only offered a meeting around the back, away from the rest.

So you wonder why we are putting forward strong arguments in the media? It is a position we have been forced into.

When the Assembly seems to refuse to accept the scientific evidence, which states clearly that culling badgers will not work, now that's the real "getting back to basics" which you state in your comment, and which the Assembly should face in the future and drop the idea of culling badgers.

Michael Sharratt

Badger Trust Cymru

Cwm Coile

Whitland