Dr. Damien Barrett:

This is a game of doing a lot of small things right rather than one single thing. Sceptical might be too strong a word to describe how I felt initially, but I started looking at the evidence for this, particularly on the dairy side as opposed to the beef side. Before TB was incorporated into the EBI, a large number of the top EBI bulls, when we looked back at their TB figures in retrospect, were very bad. This meant their progeny would be highly susceptible to TB. In an industry like this where one or two popular bulls, or a small number of popular bulls, could have a large number of progeny, this has an impact. It was really highlighted to me when I saw that quite a proportion of the top 20 EBI bulls did not have great TB resistance figures. The situation with beef is slightly different. I certainly think, however, that genetics has a contribution to make, but it is one of several things we need to address.