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.     

Harrington's elusive balance

The revival of interest in James Harrington's political theory which has occurred in recent years has not led to a resolution of the puzzle about his Agrarian Law. That puzzle requires unfolding how Harrington expected that the Agrarian would achieve his ambitions for a stable commonwealth. This paper suggests one explanation of the difficulties encountered, by focusing on ambiguities in Harrington's terminology and on inadequacies in his method.