A country that has seen a lot of dark days in its long history is seeing another one as the controversial British badger cull got underway Monday night in Gloucestershire and Somerset. The environmental minister said the cull was the best solution to stop the spread of bovine tuberculosis since an oral vaccine is not ready. Protestors are ready to disrupt the cull by licensed shooters. A quarter of million Britons signed a petition calling on DEFRA to cancel the cull and focus on finding a workable vaccination. Jay Tiernan the organizer of Stop the Cull campaign was arrested for trespassing at a DEFRA site in Gloucestershire. The police will be "ensuring public safety" which usually means making a lot of arrests of animal activists. Five thousand badgers are scheduled to be killed. The head of the National Farmer Union, the influential lobby group, said killing thousands of head of cattle is not a solution while knowing the disease has a reservoir in wildlife. The Labour Party has condemned the pilot culls and says the they will perturb the badger population and promote the spread of TB.Activists on patrol in Somerset have yet to see any dead badgers according to the Guardian. The activists are camping out and keeping an eye on badger setts (burrows). They report no signs of gunners and no badger carcasses. The Somerset cull area is large, about 58 square miles. DEFRA is not releasing any information on the culls until they are completed in six weeks. The government admits an injectable badger vaccine is available but requires that individual badgers be trapped and injected. A large ten year study commissioned by the British government concluded culling can make no meaningful contribution to the control of bovine TB, yet the Tory government is determined to see the experiment through despite widespread popular and scientific opposition.