IT seems that the great badger slaughter is about to commence. A private company has been set up to manage the operation. Hundreds of operatives have been recruited, briefed, trained and tested. Just a bit of argument over who pays how much for what and they are off to the woods.

There will be a pilot exercise to determine the best way of killing what was, until a week ago, a strictly protected animal. In previous trials traps were used and badgers shot at point blank range.?But with surveys recording that 80 per cent of us are against the cull, many of these would be destroyed and the badgers released.

So the plan is to put out chocolate covered pea­nuts and shoot them through the lungs at 70 yards range with high velocity rifles. Bullets that miss have a range of one and a half miles. The corpses would be left to putrefy where they died presumably for health and safety reasons.

After 49 years of walking in the Forest I am aware of 40 setts some of which I have watched repeatedly. Chris Ridler, my friend and neighbour, has a large-scale map of the local area on which he has marked just under 400 setts. That was part of a scientific study to learn about the geological skill of the badgers in excavating setts some of which are centuries old. My interest was that I know no better way to relax than sit quietly by a sett at dusk watching the badgers come out, scratch themselves, followed by cubs eager for a bit of rough and tumble.

As for the facts about the bovine TB, no-one doubts that farmers are distressed and want it eradicated. No-one doubts that some badgers suffer TB but no-one knows how many and the incidence is probably tiny and certainly many setts are completely free of it. But do badgers infect cattle? Or possibly the other way round?

My grandfather kept cattle on a 30 acre farm high up in the Pennines near Colne in Lancashire. The building where he tried to support a wife and five children is still there, no mains service and water from the stream. He died of TB.

No badgers lived up there. Today medical opinion is that a main cause is stress. In the past and in poor countries where people are overcrowded and under-nourished TB was and is widespread.

The other evening we heard an acknowledged internationally respected farmer and adviser describe the stress caused to cattle by some intensive methods of husbandry to squeeze out the last drop of milk in a tight market. We also learn that surface water on poorly drained pasture has been proved to carry the TB bacilli.?This will be drunk by cattle, badgers, foxes and your off-the-lead lab­rador.

Vaccination has proved effective on badgers. It could also work with cattle.?The main hold up is the cost to farmers requiring more visits by the vet to administer and check it. As for the 10 year trial cull over a large area set against cases of TB in cattle the 16 per cent reduction is plucked out of the air and the statistics have so many variables they are useless. The report actually says that "there can be no meaningful relationship between TB in cattle and TB in badgers."

As I see it we are dealing with panic rather than service. In World War I anything German had to disappear. Orchestras dared not play Beethoven, German shepherd dogs became alsations, and the young Winston Churchill persuaded our royal family, which since 1713 is of German extraction, to change their name to Windsor.?Badger numbers have increased thanks to the invention of the electric razor which meant that shaving brushes made with badger hair were history.

I recall one walk in woodland beside the Wye below the Chepstow racecouse. I made a small detour to check on a sett. It was around noon. Trapped in the entrance was a young badger.

Most setts are dug into sandy or soft chalky soil. This was heavy clay and there had been a heavy fall at the entrance trapping the rear half of the cub. It could have been there many hours and was still weakly struggling.

I tied the dog to a tree. But how to extricate it without causing injury to it or me? Badgers will not bite unless terrified but their bite is awesome which in the past made baiting them with dogs such fun for people sick in the head, so I found a stick. The animal trembled but kept still so, as gently as I could, I dug around it. After a couple of minutes it cottoned on and began frantically digging with its front paws while I dug round its hind quarters. It took about 20 minutes to free it. The creature gave me one look and slithered back into the sett.

Today that sett is lucky. It is on the Welsh side of the river where they have banned the cull, like the National Trust, the Gloucester Wildlife Trust and a lot of farmers who genuinely love the countryside and respect this fascinating creature that we know was here at least 60,000 years ago. I pray that I will spend part of my 50th year walking the Forest taking my grandchildren badger watching.

– Roger Horsfield, Pastors Hill,?Bream.