Wind In The Willows author Kenneth Grahame has a lot to answer for. Ever since the publication of his novel about the adventures of Mole, Ratty, Toad and Mr Badger in 1908 the public has generally viewed wildlife as endearing.

There are exceptions, of course: tattooed men with big aggressive dogs in places like Keighley, Sheffield and Doncaster whose pleasure it is to set dog against dog or set their dogs against badgers.

In April this year, prosecuting lawyer Nigel Monaghan told Bradford Magistrates Court that the RSPCA viewed badger-baiting as “rife” in the Bradford and Keighley areas and that the case in hand, regarding a 23-year-old Keighley man, was “as bad in terms of suffering and cruelty as one can get”.

Badger-baiting is illegal under the provisions of the 1992 Protection of Badgers Act. It is not the same thing as badger-culling, although the emotions stirred by the subject often give that impression.

The weekend before last there was a big protest in London against a proposed badger cull in west Goucestershire and Somerset. Queen guitarist Brian May and naturalist Bill Oddie were among those opposing the shooting of 4,000 badgers, to control the spread of TB among cattle.

Jack Reedy, of the Badger Trust, told the T&A that the cull could take four to five years. The Badger Trust has spent £250,000 on two judicial reviews in Wales and England to prevent culling. It was successful in Wales but not in England, hence the cull in the west country.

Mr Reedy said: “This first one is a trial on whether the method of killing is humane and safe. The badgers are not going to be caged or contained. They are going to shoot a badger and time the length of its squealing. It’s the most appalling and brutal thing to do.

“Between 1997 and 2006, about £50 million was spent on a randomised cull of 11,000 badgers, but it was found that of those only 1,100 had infection at any level.

“The verdict of that survey was that while badgers are implicated in the spread of Bovine TB, killing them will have no meaningful effect on the eradication of the disease.”

He said the argument had been caught up in a political row. The last Labour Government had refused to allow culling, prompting landowning Conservatives to put pressure on the national party to include it in the Conservative manifesto.

“They were misguided enough to do that, so now there’s no getting out of it,” he added.

Bradford West Respect Party MP George Galloway was the primary sponsor of an Early Day Motion to Parliament against badger-culling that was signed by 29 MPs.

He called on the House of Commons to oppose mass culling and urged the Environment Minister to emulate the Welsh Assembly by implementing a vacccination programme with in creased levels of testing and bio-security as a better long-term method of tackling bovine TB.

Mr Reedy said from 1970, for about 20 years, strict regulation of cattle movement and annual testing had effectively controlled the level of the disease. The relaxation of these controls and the BSE and foot and mouth outbreaks had made matters worse.

Bureaucracy has also been a hindrance, according to Bradford-based author and political analyst Richard North, who is a trained and qualified environmental health officer who specialises in farming and agriculture.

He said: “Life has been made more difficult for farmers and gamekeepers in the day-to-day running of things because the Protection of Badgers Act, brought in to amend the 1886 Berne Convention on Protected Species, means that they have to get a licence from Whitehall to cull badgers.

“No applications for a licence have been made for fear of being targeted by Animal Rights activists. It’s unfortunate that activists are using emotive words.

“Badgers have no known predators now we have killed off bears and wolves, so you have a population growth of badgers that forage wider and wider for food, get into cattle sheds and fodder and spread bacteria through their urine.

“No-one is advocating mass kills. It’s not the answer to everything, but in an emotional debate, control of the wildlife population is a necessary part of countryside management.”

Asked if a properly-supervised cull would eradicate illegal badger baiting, Mr Reedy said: “It would, but it would also eradicate badgers as well.”