Queen guitarist and wildlife activist, Brian May sets out to “get to the truth about Bovine TB, cattle, and badgers” in a new TV documentary to air this week.
The BBC documentary ‘Brian May: The Badgers, the Farmers and Me’ examines the results of a research project which focused on the crisis caused by TB for one farm family and also highlights his opposition to the UK’s ongoing badger cull.
The Queen guitarist has for decades been a passionate campaigner against the badger cull organising marches, protests, and a petition against it.
According to May around 230,000 badgers have been slaughtered in the UK todate but he believes they are “being scapegoated” in relation to TB.
In 2016 May teamed up with vet Dick Sibley and farmer Robert Reed, whose Gatcombe Farm near Seaton in Devon, was “chronically infected with TB”.
He backed what was described as a “groundbreaking” four-year experiment to eradicate the disease without harming badgers.
The BBC documentary highlights that although this experiment “faced numerous challenges” its supporters declared it a success because the farm was declared TB-free without the culling of a single badger.
May and his team now believe that they have identified the “real source of TB spread among cattle” and they want to “convince the wider farming community, the scientific world and authorities to listen to and consider their findings”.
Brian May
According to May he does not “blame people for being suspicious of me in the beginning” when it comes to the ongoing debate over the source of TB.
“I’m a guitarist. You know I’m a rock star. What am I doing? Why would I have some contribution to make?
“I came in to save the badgers. I now realise that to save the badgers, you have to save everybody because it’s a mess. It’s a tragic human drama where people’s hearts are broken,” he said.
According to May the documentary is both about the farmers’ speaking about their experiences of TB and also about “telling what happened in our experiment in Gatcombe”.
But a political campaigning group, the Countryside Alliance, has warned the BBC director- general Tim Davie that commissioning the film by Brian May is ‘fundamentally incompatible’ with BBC impartiality rules.
In a letter to Tim Davie, Tim Bonner, chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, has accused the BBC of allowing a campaigner with “clearly partisan views” to front a current affairs programme.
Brian May: The Badgers, the Farmers and Me, is scheduled to be broadcast on BBC Two at 9pm on Friday, August 23.
