WHEN I woke up on Easter day the weather was discouraging. I was depressed. Then a song thrush burst into song near to my bedroom window. I decided to get up and go to church. We should be thankful of course. The thrush as always did not stay long. The thuggish blackbirds chased it away. They are the big capitalists of the bird world. Wanting to stamp out competition and have it all to themselves. But they are up against the magpies who are the garden's bankers who snatch away the hard work of others.

But what depresses me most is not greed but sheer stupidity like this massacre of our badgers which is taking place as I write. Some cattle catch TB some badgers have TB therefore it is argued that the badgers are giving TB to the cattle, costing us money. So we must kill them. But hang on! Badgers live in or on the edge of woods. Cows live in sheds or, with luck, in fields.

I have watched badgers on a great many occasions but I have not seen one of them cuddling up or going anywhere near cows. Badgers are very hygienic characters who dig and use latrines both near the sett and around the borders of their territories. I have seen cats in farmyards and if you check with your laptop you will learn that cats are great carriers of scores of diseases including TB. Rats are always everywhere and a great nuisance in and around farm buildings. They carry TB. The trouble is that once people get an idea through stress and ignorance it sticks. My mother could not be shaken from the belief that you must close the curtains when lighting the fire. She also believed that you must always put a bulb in the light socket to stop the electricity leaking. She was a highly intelligent woman but having to go into the mill at age 11 when my grandfather died of TB like all children of her age and time she had never had a science lesson in her life. So we drew the curtains to keep out the sun's rays.

When teaching in Saudi Arabia the doctors told me that every boy in my class had been shown positive for TB, though it developed in very few. The answer was vaccination.

The same BCG jab seems to work well with badgers and this is the policy of the National Trust. The only objection to this is that it costs more than luring the badgers out with bait and shooting them by people claiming to be marksmen.

Last week I travelled down to Selborne in Hampshire to visit a sett which is very ancient and which I have used to watch and show the badgers to groups of adults and children. My son taught at a nearby school and he reckons that he spent around 1000 hours over four years sitting quietly at dusk with around 500 teenagers in total in mini bus size groups. Not once were they disappointed and the enthusiasm of the youngsters was moving and wholesome.

The National Farmers' Union claim falsely that killing badgers reduces the incidence of TB in cattle as proved by trials. But the head of the last great experiment in Ireland, a senior scientist, says that the results do not prove anything because you cannot compare two areas – one where they cull, and one where they don't as they are all different. Irish farmers have spent money on improving bio-security, and more TB inspections that account for this success in reducing this cattle disease.

John Keats wrote a famous poem Ode to a Nightingale which I can still recite by heart. He listened to a bird singing in a garden in Hampstead which was not nightingale habitat. It was a song thrush but that does not really matter. It is a beautiful poem and badgers are beautiful animals.

John Keats died in a room near the Spanish steps in Rome. This had no toilet, no washing facilities and he had to pay Italians to tend to him. He died feeling lonely not just poor but a failure leading a life that was highly stressed, poorly nourished, and harassed. These conditions make both humans and cattle vulnerable to TB. My grandfather is a good example of this. He was trying to bring up his family in a small farm high up in the Pennines in hopeless conditions lacking all modern amenities. Even the Government minister in charge of this operation said on radio that it will take decades to kill the numbers of badgers required and that vaccination would be better, but we must all bow down to ignorance. Song thrushes, nightingales, and hundreds of other species are declining fast and we are all the poorer for it. Thank God that sett in Selbourne, a village where Gilbert White wrote a book that sparked off the study and love of the natural world, is still thriving and is situated on National Trust land.

– Roger Horsfield, Bream.