Badger-friendly milk

Remember dolphin-friendly tuna? Well there’s a new enviro-phrase in town..... apparently we’ve all now got to look out for badger-friendly milk.

Badgers are getting a bit of a bad rep recently, thanks to the bovine TB debate, and a pilot scheme to cull them has now begun in Somerset and Gloucestershire.

In these two counties cattle farmers can now legally shoot badgers on their farms.

Clearly the local milk I buy from Our Cow Molly, in Sheffield, is badger-friendly because Yorkshire isn’t involved in the cull.

But according to a survey by animal charity Care for the Wild, supermarket shoppers will have less of a say in where their milk comes from.

The organisation found that only three supermarkets – Asda, Waitrose and M&S, can guarantee that their own brand milk comes from farms outside Somerset and Gloucestershire, which aren’t involved in the cull.

Tesco, Sainsburys, Morrisons and the Co-op were unable to offer customers that choice.

Philip Mansbridge, CEO of Care for the Wild, said: “The reasons why supermarkets can or can’t offer this might be to do with luck rather than policy, or it might be to do with complicated supply chains which, frankly, shouldn’t be so complicated that they don’t actually know where the milk has come from.

“Either way, customers should be given choice – a choice to buy cage-free eggs, a choice to buy free range pork, and a choice to buy badger-friendly milk. I think when they are given that choice, many will take it.

“We got a lot of standard replies about this being a difficult issue for the farmers, which it is. But they seem to be forgetting that all of us are their customers – neither the farms nor the supermarkets would exist if it wasn’t for the people who buy their products. That seems to have been forgotten in the rush to defend this policy.”

Care for the Wild is collecting a petition against the cull on its website.