This is a national issue which will be of direct concern to the people of Maidstone Borough Council when DEFRA "rolls out" its culling policy in 2014.

The object of the petition is to ensure that Maidstone Borough Council's badger population is as safe as possible from slaughter and that the already available injectable badger vaccine against bTB is used in as many cases as possible.

We ask this because we believe the culling policy is inhumane (DEFRA's measurement of "humaneness" is to time the screams of wounded badgers), inefficient (previous culls showed an increase in bTB because of badger movement) and unscientific (the majority of scientific opinion hold that a cull will have "no meaningful result").

To preserve the integrity of this petition please only sign it if you live, work or study in the Maidstone Borough Council area.

For details of badger petitions in other parts of England, please contact B-R-A-V-E http://www.b-r-a-v-e.co.uk

We, the undersigned, call on Maidstone Borough Council to prohibit the culling of badgers on council-owned land and invest in vaccination programmes locally. We ask this because we believe culling to be inhumane, inefficient and unscientific.