Thank you, Cabinet Secretary. We published this report last Friday because we want to be completely transparent about what we're doing. Obviously, there is a lot of interest, particularly with people comparing what's happening in Wales and what's happening in England.
So, as part of the work on these prolonged herd breakdowns, persistent herd breakdowns—and the Cabinet Secretary is absolutely right; we have between 60 and 70 of those at any one time and that's about 10 per cent of the breakdowns that we have in Wales—we have, over the last 18 months, been working up a bespoke action plan. That looks at all risk factors. It doesn't just look at the question of wildlife, but it looks at management practices, purchasing practices, the health status of surrounding herds, what they do with the slurry—everything. As part of that, we've got to ask the question, 'Is there a reservoir of infection in the wildlife?' So, as part of this much bigger process, we focused on three farms last year, and that's what this report is about. There are other farms that technically would have qualified to have an examination of the wildlife, but either the initial sett survey work showed that there were no badgers on the farm or there was no particular evidence that we should be focusing on badgers at that point.
So, this is a start. We're also, obviously, trialling something that hasn't been done before. So, we see this as a pilot. These three farms were visited last year, there was an extensive amount of work, and I think the results are very interesting. The fact is that, on each of those farms, although we caught double figures in terms of numbers of badgers, the number that tested positive in the field was very small. It's really helpful to know that. We want to be proportionate with the work that we do. I know there are many people who look at the work that we do and are really concerned that we're doing some mass cull of badgers, so actually demonstrating the small number of animals that we have humanely killed, I think, really speaks for itself.
Whether this intervention, as part of a bigger programme, is going to deliver the benefit—and the benefit here would be clearing up these long-term herd breakdowns—we can't tell you that for some time. This is an initial phase of the programme. But I do think it's a bit simplistic to look at the total cost, divide it by five, and then saying that it's costing you however many thousand pounds per badger. We caught 37 badgers, so if you want to be really mathematical, you could divide that number by 37. But once again, I don't think that's helpful.