So what do you think anyone can practically do about it? Vaccines don't work as they only slow the disease and cattle are dying. So welfare of cattle v badgers your choice. Guess the cattle suffer more as well as the lively hood of farmers. By all means make a damn nuisance of yourself and get a police baton across your head. Doubt they will be able to shoot enough as badgers are a difficult moving target in the dark. Unfortunately gassing will be proved to be the only effective method of culling/disease control until a useful vaccine is developed.

Badgers are nice creatures to observe but if you get a badger run under your garden (protected) you likely would be out shooting them if allowed. There are some new houses being built behind my property in Bristol and they have had to provide a badger path around the site as the building has disturbed sets on previous waste ground (former tennis court). They seem to be keeping their side of the fence so far.

I understood from seperate interviews with two of the people who the govt paid to advise them on this (and much of whose advice was ignored) that even if the last cull had had a 100 percent kill rate, it would only reduce the incidence of bovine TB in the cull area by 16%. That is so insignificant as to be a waste of time.
They need to find anothr way and changing farming practices would seem to be a good start.

Regardless of the agricultural issues here, even urban environments can be very seriously affected by Badgers. We live on the outskirts of Bristol close to a heavily wooded valley where many Badger sets exist. 

A few years back there was an explosion in Badger population and all our community saw them every night in our gardens and streets. Some people were so enthralled they ignorantly put out food for them at night with a view to encouraging their presence.

During that period, one morning we came downstairs to find that the well established turf on all out three lawns had been ripped up from boarder to boarder, owing to Badgers looking for grubs, particularly 'Leather Jackets'. It was a total destruction. They completely ruined our garden. We spent that day and night relaying and repairing all the turf, pressing down to get it as flat as possible. The next morning we came downstairs to find the same level of destruction in the garden. We relayed and repaired the turf as best we could and laid down some chemicals to eradicate earth living bugs. At the time I came very close to investing in an electric fence system to keep them out. Fortunately we have not had a repeated problem albeit our lawns have never had the evenness they once had. A couple of years after, a Badger found itself apparently trapped in my neighbours garden. It went mad, screaming out which woke up at least five households and eventually escaped by smashing it's way through our pretty solid boundary fence. More expense to repair it.

Badger presence after that season (although we still see them occasionally) declined and I believe, although I have no evidence to support this, that they were subjected to a local cull. No cattle around but their sets were in the wooded section of a public park and they did undermine footpaths causing collapse etc.

Badgers are indeed elegant and noble creatures, but without doubt they can be a nuisance both to the farmer and also the urban resident. They are robust scavengers that cause both damage and disease.

Whilst I understand the sentimentality associated with these native mammals, without doubt, they can be beasts of destruction. Achieving a balanced view between sentiment for the animal and the destructive impact they can inflict seems to me to be worth considering.

To put it another way, when they wandered through the garden it was a lovely experience both for my wife and I and our children, and now latterly our grand children. However, when they smashed up our garden, we didn't feel quite so sentimental about them.

"Meanwhile in Wales, they have reduced bovine TB by 50% in five years, a figure farmers in England would be ecstatic about. But this has taken place without a badger cull, with the emphasis on farming measures and, crucially, annual testing of cattle - because you cannot beat the disease if you do not know how many cows have bTB. The Welsh government have made it clear that this is the reason for their success - but the National Farmers' Union here in England refuse to do annual testing because they claim it costs too much. Yet they were prepared to spend £10m last year on killing 1861 badgers, and they are about to do the same again. It is a failure of judgement, a failed policy and it will fail their own members, the farmers who desperately need an effective solution." - See more at: www.networkforanimals.org/news/2014-badger-cull-given-go-ahead#sthash.PgY6lVoX.dpuf