Why do we not afford wildlife the same protections as we do for other animals?

Alick Simmons argues that methods to manage wildlife and 'pests' would not be accepted for other animals, and that the profession should do more to protect the welfare of such animals.

'Killing badgers to control bTB is unethical'.

Alick Simmons argues that badger culling as a means to control bovine TB cannot be justified if considered using an established ethical framework.

'Longer jail terms are unlikely to be effective'.

Alick Simmons argues that increasing maximum sentencing for animal welfare offences will not be an effective deterrent and that preventing offences occurring in the first place should be the priority.

Quantifying experts' uncertainty about the future cost of exotic diseases.

Since the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak of 2001 in the United Kingdom, there has been debate about the sharing, between government and industry, both the costs of livestock disease outbreaks and responsibility for the decisions that give rise to them. As part of a consultation into the formation of a new body to manage livestock diseases, government veterinarians and economists produced estimates of the average annual costs for a number of exotic infectious diseases. In this article, we demonstrate how the government experts were helped to quantify their uncertainties about the cost estimates using formal expert elicitation techniques. This has enabled the decisionmakers to have a greater appreciation of government experts' uncertainty in this policy area.