Death on the farm: Culling badgers in North Pembrokeshire (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The Welsh Assembly Government has recently announced its intention to cull all badgers from North Pembrokeshire on the grounds that they are vectors of bovine tuberculosis. This article considers some local reactions to this news, ranging from those who support the cull wholeheartedly to those who argue against it, and some of the reasons why people adopt different standpoints. The article considers a range of issues which help explain why people think as they do; these include perception of risk, ethnicity, ideas about animals and wildlife, the selective uses of both scientific literature and emotion, and finally some of the local and regional politics involved.     

Cull or vaccinate?: Badger politics in Wales

In this sequel to an article on the badger‐cull published in the April issue of 2010, the author provides an update on what is happening to the culls announced for North Pembrokeshire and for England.     

A Three-State Markov Model of Choice Behavior within Spatial Structures

This paper derives a simple mathematical model of spatial learning and choice by integrating several psychological theories, whose features accord with the results of empirical investigation in a previous paper [2]. A sample of homogeneous decision-makers are assumed to make a succession of selections from a given set of initially unknown spatial alternatives (for example, a set of shopping places for a good). The decision-makers pass through two states of “recognition” and “discrimination” learning, before reaching an equilibrium state. In the equilibrium state, decision-makers have sufficiently learned the attributes of the alternatives so that satisfactory choices are always made. These assumptions permit the derivation of mathematical expressions to answer two questions: first, what proportion of decision-makers will be in the equilibrium state after any given time interval, and second, what proportion of decision-makers will choose any designated spatial alternative after the same time interval. In the second case, the proportion of decision-makers choosing an alternative is predicted from the individuals' perceptions of the attributes of the alternatives. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the model and suggestions for its testing and further development.     

‘Child sacrifice’ in Uganda? The BBC, ‘witch doctors’ and anthropologists (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This article discusses both several recent BBC broadcasts on allegations of ‘child sacrifice’ in Uganda and criticisms of the programmes by a number of British anthropologists. It pursues the idea that both the broadcasts and the criticisms raise two sets of crucial questions: the first is in regard to the interpretation of alleged ritual killings in contemporary Africa and the effects of their representation on lay audiences, both non‐African and African; the second concerns media representations of Africa and public anthropology. Anthropologists (and indeed scholars from other disciplines such as history) have a lot of expertise to offer in terms of understanding the occult in many societies, including contextualising this realm in terms of historical processes and material concerns and suggesting links between apparently disparate issues. In this way, they can they can sometimes go beyond surface manifestations, offer alternative explanations and show that things are not always the way they first seem. However, in order to play an effective public role in this regard, anthropologists need to be willing to grapple pro‐actively with such matters of public concern, not least by engaging constructively with the media.     

Evidence of butchery and hominid activities at Torralba and Ambrona; an evaluation using microscopic techniques

Torralba and Ambrona have been interpreted as butchery sites for many years, a contention recently challenged; natural death or carnivore activities are invoked as an alternative explanation. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) of bone surface replicas distinguishes among hominid-produced cutmarks, carnivore tooth scratches, and other types of bone damage. A sample of 102 replicas, comprising the most likely cutmarks on a combined sample of roughly 3000 fossils from Torralba and Ambrona, were scanned to determine the major agent of damage. Microscopically verified cutmarks are present, but rare, occurring in less than 1% of the bones in the combined sample. Carnivore tooth scratches are comparably rare. In contrast, evidence of sedimentary abrasion, which obliterates the diagnostic features of cutmarks, is present on nearly every bone from Torralba and Ambrona. It remains unresolved whether cutmarks were initially more common on these bones and were subsequently obliterated by abrasion, or whether the incidence of cutmarks was always low. These data demonstrate clearly that hominids and carnivores each damaged some bones at Torralba and Ambrona, but the frequency of each type of mark is too low to confirm strongly the interpretation of these sites as either butchery or carnivore remains.