We are heading back to the office now. Thanks for following this morning’s live tweets! We will do this again on a morning when we are just vaccinating not sampling so you can see the difference. Follow @cornishbadgers for regular updates. Goodbye! #badgervaccination
As vaccination is fine under licence it’s important to record exactly who did what, when, to each badger! This project is subject to oversight under three different licences by @naturalengland and the home office #badgervaccination
As well as trapping and vaccinating we are trying a new way to estimate badger numbers using camera traps. If we know how many badgers there are we can estimate what proportion we are vaccinating, helping us evaluate the likely impact on TB #badgervaccination
The vaccine has to stay cold all the time until it is made up to inject so it sits in the vehicle in a 12V fridge. There’s a thermometer with it to make sure it never leaves the safe zone for temperature #badgervaccination
You need a llicence to set badger traps but here the farmers have prebaited the traps to get the badgers used to going in. One farmer came along this morning to see what we caught #badgervaccination
So this morning we have anaesthetised, microchipped, blood sampled, vaccinated and released five badgers. I chose an easy trap round to live tweet! If we were just vaccinating we would have been finished over an hour ago #badgervaccination
We are careful to disinfect boots and vehicle tyres between farms to avoid spreading contamination. We are trying to help farmers control a disease not spread it ourselves #badger vaccination