THE Badger Trust was back in court yesterday (Thursday) in its battle to stop the badger cull - while a pair of high profile anti-cull campaigners announced they would be out on patrol in West Somerset tonight (Friday).

Entertainer and ornithologist Bill Oddie will be joining the chief executive of the League Against Cruel Sports Joe Duckworth on a Somerset Badger Patrol.

They will be following in the footsteps of rock star Brian May who joined campaigners on their nightly vigil in the cull zone last month.

Meanwhile, the Badger Trust is trying to stop the cull by taking its fight to the Court of Appeal in London.The trust is questioning the legality of the Government's decision to continue the cull without having an independent panel of experts in place to monitor its impact.

The High Court originally threw out the trust's application for a judicial review in August but campaigners subsequently won permission to appeal against that ruling.

The trust believes that without an independent panel of experts, the Government will be unable to monitor the cull's safety, effectiveness and humaneness.

A panel was put in place for the first pilot cull last year and concluded that the pilot had not achieved its aims and was not humane.

The Government argued that the panel of experts was only ever intended to monitor the first cull, as this year's would be independently audited and lessons had been learnt from the first year.

Dominic Dyer, chief executive of the Badger Trust and policy adviser at Care for the Wild, described Defra's decision to scrap the panel a "national disgrace".