If you’re a badger, get your head down and keep it low – very low! The knives of politicians and supermarket price-setters are being sharpened. What a shame the brains of these people are not anywhere near half as sharp as the weapons they are apparently honing to kill one of the oldest landowners in Britain.

Do badgers pass on bovine TB to cattle, or do cattle, as some possibly mistakenly suggest, infect badgers? 

In any conflict it’s easy to align oneself with either of the two camps, but in doing so, the danger is we may conveniently ignore a “third way”, requiring patience.

No one can argue that bovine TB is not a serious problem, but surely we need to address the cause and not thrash around destroying an animal (reportedly 80 per cent of the nation’s badger population), which finds itself, through no fault of its own, carrying the can. If both cattle and badgers share this disease then perhaps there is a solution in the way we manage the land. 

Where was bovine TB three decades ago? What has changed? 

Food producers are no longer in control of the process. Prescriptive, ill-thought-out government edicts linked to the “tail wagging” activities of international food retailers have led to quick fixes.

Industrial farming (and I find it hard to blame farmers for this) has depleted the soil of the essential minerals and vitamins needed, not only in our own foods but also in the foods taken up by land-based animals. 

The grey suits sitting in their DEFRA air-conditioned city offices seem to scorn basic land husbandry – preferring shallow rooted rye grasses which respond well to chemical fertilisers (especially nitrogen) at the expense of deep rooted grasses (higher mineral uptake) and clovers. 

In upsetting the countryside balance between mankind and animals  the grey suits are condemning badgers, as a result of their own myopic interests, to a culling regime the likes of which we’ve never seen before.

Studies in Gloucestershire and in the USA have shown that sweetened blocks of minerals high in selenium and iodine have helped keep at bay the incidence of bovine TB. 

The solution, it seems to me, lies in the soil and not in the addled brains of grey suited civil servants who wouldn’t know a badger from an Armani suit.

Stuart Stockley, Ennerdale Road, Tettenhall.