“Cattle cannot be infected by just sniffing Badger urine or droppings,that is impossible. The bacterium either has to be taken in as an airborne particle or ingested by it eating it.

Airborne infection is the most prevalent way of infection, which needs continuous contact between the infected and the non infected, whereby millions of bacterium is passed on.”

I am not convinced by your thinking on this.
I don’t understand why you think that “sniffing badger urine” could not transfer millions of bacteria from infected badgers.

Surely the taking in of airborn particles is precisely what sniffing is!

Badgers often move around and urinate on pasture, so the “sniffing” could be simply ordinary inhale breaths while eating grass (which is surely virtually a constant normal event among grazing cattle).

It is established that the Bovine TB organism can survive on pasture for months (do a google search for say “M.bovis” pasture months)

If you don’t believe that a grazing cow could take in millions of M. Bovis, then what rate of bacterial particle intake do you assume, per minute say. They are not large beasts you know - these bacteria. If you google on bacterial concentrations you quickly hit some pretty big numbers.

But it seems to me, even if the inhalation rate (per unit time) was - as you seem to suggest - lower than the order of millions, nevertheless cattle graze for quite extended periods of time.

Air is 3 dimensional. That means that - just to get a rough measure of the thing - even as high a number as 0.1 million particles in a single litre of air has them spaced out pretty sparsely (around 2mm apart on average), which, given that bacterial diameters tend to be quoted in micrometers (thousanths of a milimeter), is seems rather sparse to me.

At least 80% of bTB in cattle is cattle to cattle transmission.Transmission by Badgers to cattle is a still very contentious point, there has been no clear way that it can be done. No scientific study HAS shown that it is possible.

Cattle cannot be infected by just sniffing Badger urine or droppings,that is impossible. The bacterium either has to be taken in as an airborne particle or ingested by it eating it.

Airborne infection is the most prevalent way of infection, which needs continuous contact between the infected and the non infected, whereby millions of bacterium is passed on.

Ingestion is the harder route. It needs many millions more to infect the recipient in this way.

Cattle naturally avoid both urine and faeces of badgers when grazing. By the time they are ready to eat grass that has been urinated on, the bTB bacillus has been destroyed by ultraviolet light from daylight.

If cattle eat anywhere near faeces polluted grass it is because the farm is over stocked with animals and the weaker of the herd are pushed toward the worst grazing areas. That is poor stockmanship.

It is about time people looked at the truth behind the bTB debacle instead of looking for a scapegoat to blame the ills of the industry on.

P.S What happens to culled animals? Many where the bTB lesions are present simply have them removed at the abattoir and are then sent back into the food chain to ofset the cost of the compensation. Something to think on.