TED Sherrell's articles usually display good sense, but the latest instalment shows that Ted has little understanding of wildlife. First, foxes. Yes, when foxes get amongst hens, they kill them all. After the killing, the fox will take just one chicken away. It has only one mouth, so it's difficult to take more. What the fox will do, if it has the chance, is to return to pick up the others one by one. If a fox kills only one chicken, there is no guarantee that the others will be there when it returns. If they are dead, they can't run away, so the fox maximises its chances of surviving. It may be unpalatable, but humans have similar predatory instincts. Ted complains that foxes kill cats. There are about ten million cats in Britain and if each cat kills only one bird a year, that's ten-million birds. Foxes aren't normally able to catch small birds, so one predator killing another results in a few more birds surviving. Given the choice between cats and birds, I'll choose birds every time. Second, badgers. It's well-established that badgers are carriers of bovine tuberculosis (BTB) but badgers are not the sole cause of BTB in cattle. Infected cattle can transmit BTB to other cattle by aerosol spray from both the mouth and nose. It's possible to have BTB in cattle without having badgers as is demonstrated in the Isle of Man, where there are no badgers but there is BTB. It's also possible to have badgers and no BTB, as demonstrated by the Scots. So, even if badgers were slaughtered to extinction, BTB would not automatically also disappear. The Irish tried this and it didn't work. Bovine TB was almost eradicated by 1970, when there were only about 1,000 cases per year. Eleven years of localised badger culling failed to reduce the toll further. A Conservative government keen to reduce regulation ended annual cattle testing in the mid-80s. Then the devastating effects of BSE and foot-and-mouth disease caused testing to be abandoned altogether as farms lost thousands of animals. Afterwards, there was a rush to restock. Movement regulations were relaxed and cattle were moved all over the country. BTB returned and the badgers can't be blamed for that. It's clear that the incidence of BTB in cattle is not a simple matter. Even so, the government has just wasted £10-million on a localised badger cull when Professor Krebs, the instigator of the 10-year randomised badger culling trials, the only serious scientific test carried out to date, said that it would not be an effective way of controlling BTB and such proved to be the case. Half that money would have been better spent in maintaining the research base at Kew Gardens, which faces a sizeable reduction in staff. With the inexorable increase in the world's population, food plants are going to be more important than animals. Dr K J Vines Horrabridge