On two sides of the orchards a stream ran through two ponds and an old sheep-wash, where we investigated newts, sticklebacks, caddis fly larvae cased in sticks, and a strange little clam that I rather oddly believed got around by clamping itself on the feet of newts. We were fascinated by the red underwater root hairs of the willows fanned out into the ponds, and the springs that formed constantly shifting sand mushrooms at the source of the brook. Further down, at the Bottoms, there were chestnut trees on a steep bank above the brook, where the cooing of quists in the summer afternoons became for me part of the joy of summer. And on that bank were the badger setts.
We were only the day shift in the Bottoms. We built dams and dens, of course, and climbed trees, but we were always very aware of the badgers, and every day we saw signs of what they did last night. Their setts formed platforms where they pulled earth out when extending their setts. We saw where they had shuffled backwards pulling fresh bedding into the setts. I still have a plaster cast of a badger footprint I made when I was eight, kept, with other precious things, in a drawer among my pants and socks. We tracked their journeys in the sandy soil of that Old Red Sandstone country, and were led as a result to other colonies. We saw their lavatories, though we did not know these marked the boundaries of their territories, and we observed what they had eaten, and found wasp nests that they had pillaged. (That day I got so badly stung I couldn’t open my eyes for two days). We also found their skulls, with the big ridge along the top to anchor the jaw muscles. We were told stories of their ferocious jaws that locked shut, and I suppose I’ve only just now realised that they once needed those jaws to defend themselves from wolves, and bears, and wolverines, not for their main diet of worms. And I had an early, inaccurate, ecological insight, of an association between badgers and dog’s mercury – which were both common in ancient woodlands.
The badgers must have become accustomed to our whooping and carrying on, and to the lingering smells of little boys, but as we were never there at night we didn’t see the night shift emerging, although at night their presence flavoured our childhoods too. They were suspected of lurking underneath my bed, and in the cupboard underneath the stairs too, and when I ran back upstairs to bed after using the bathroom they were snapping at my heels.
When I saw last week in the Hereford Times, ‘Applications received for Herefordshire badger culling licences’, I went fearfully back there for the first time since. We saw a dead fox someone had shot. We saw a magpie, in a Larsen trap, that was very frightened as we approached but I think, if Magpies did ‘retrospect’, would have ended up, in it, being very pleased that we got there before the keeper. But the badgers, that may well have been there since before the Normans arrived, had gone. So we went to Thumb Wood, another ancient badger city of my childhood. The centre of the wood is now a pheasant release pen. One burrow there was being used, but the rain had made it impossible, even with my boyhood badger tracking skills, to be sure if it was badgers, and if it was I don’t much fancy their chances there if the keeper is planning on using this pen this summer.
I’ve been to one or two other badger places since then, and I’ve found one sett entrance that is certainly used by badgers. Friends tell me they know of others. Badgers are seen as tenacious creatures – Badger in ‘Wind in the Willows’, whose sett is set among the underground ruins of a Roman city, says: ‘People come—they stay for a while, they flourish, they build—and they go. It is their way. But we remain. There were badgers here, I've been told, long before that same city ever came to be. And now there are badgers here again. We are an enduring lot, and we may move out for a time, but we wait, and are patient, and back we come. And so it will ever be."
I would like to be able to take comfort in that notion, but I confess I’m struggling.
A colleague some years ago on a walk with me in Radnorshire, when I was pointing out badger paths and old nests and suchlike to the youngsters with us, said ‘Rich, going for a walk with you is just like being with Old Seth off Emmerdale’. Equipped with this fine testimonial, I’m not going to support my views here with a lot of quotations and references. But I have talked about the badger cull with vets, farmers, writers and naturalists, and I have crawled all over the internet, and I stand by the view of the badger cull that follows.
Bovine TB is found in cattle, sheep, and many of our native wild mammals, including badgers. 95% of transmission is from cattle to cattle, and it may well be that our wildlife has been infected by cows, rather than the other way around. There may be many factors in the increase in bovine TB since the 1970s, but it is more likely to have been caused by changes in farming practices than by changes in badger behaviour, which would only change in response to farming practices anyway (such as the increased use of maize silage, for example). While I don’t doubt that cattle can catch TB from infected badgers, I do not believe it is the root of the problem. Bovine TB is a farm problem primarily, and culling badgers will not solve it.
The idea that badgers are the cause of the problem is convenient for farmers who want practical solutions and don’t want to deal with complexity. Farmers who might otherwise be uncomfortable about the cull have convinced themselves that various conservation problems are caused by badgers, so justifying the cull with the bizarre notion that killing badgers is also good for the environment. The loss of curlews and lapwings, certainly the result of farming practices, is blamed on badgers eating their eggs, although these species had coexisted from prehistory into my own childhood. Farmers are less willing to acknowledge that sheep eat curlew eggs and have been filmed doing so on the camera traps of conservationists. The cull also suits governments that have not invested adequately in the development of vaccines for cattle or for badgers, or in the development of tests that can differentiate between infected and vaccinated cattle. Governments and farmers are reluctant to take the obvious step to vaccination, partly because it involves a modest amount of disruption to the existing business model, with farmers moving cattle excessively and wanting to trade products overseas with no restrictions. (Vaccinated animals are potentially more difficult to export live or as meat/milk products).* Blaming badgers suits politicians who, because of their failure to energise essential research and development of vaccines, have nothing to offer farmers except to continue with the scientifically-discredited culling policy. Recent events tell us how quickly vaccines could have been developed if there had been the will to do it.
The policy also reveals a nasty imbalance that fundamentally affects conservation. Politicians have listened to the powerful lobbying of the National Farmers Union, possibly because many politicians are or identify with landowners, and they have ignored conservationists. If you count the number of farmers in the UK and the number of subscribing members of conservation organisations, and make the crude assumption that most farmers are for culling and most conservationists are against it, it seems that one farmer’s view outweighs the views of 45 conservationists. This is a crude calculation but is roughly what has happened. (There are 109,000 farmers in the UK and 4.5 million subscribers to conservation bodies).
The government has repeatedly stated that the badger cull will end next year. That they should still continue a discredited and doomed culling policy for another year seems inexplicable except in terms of placating farmers and being seen to be doing something, unless they hope that badgers will be virtually eliminated by the time the cull ends. I’m not too trusting of the figures available for badgers culled, nor of estimates of the badger population. Although badgers are the most protected species in the UK, under three separate UK laws and the Berne Convention, I believe they are at real risk of widespread extinction because the cull has now become ‘farmer-led’, which not only means that farmers have been paid to kill badgers, but that they have now begun to assume that badger killing is unofficially tolerated, and round here I know that badgers are being shot at night by ‘lampers’, and trapped illegally, and that farmers are finding ways of getting badgers to take poisons down into their setts. Badgers setts are well known features, and eradicating badgers is easy. We know where they live. Farming has caused the loss of much of our wildlife already, through mechanisms such as habitat loss, insect loss due to pesticides, lack of food caused by intensive farming methods, and pollution of soils and watercourses with chemical and fertiliser residues, but to get to the point of actually paying farmers to eradicate wildlife is a new and utterly deplorable development. Think a moment about that. We are actually paying farmers £50 a head for shooting badgers. We have sleepwalked into tolerating their practices even to the point where, according to Prof. Dave Goulson,** our farmland is now largely hostile to life, but paying them to actually kill such a much-loved animal in their thousands is an escalation that ought to have been utterly inconceivable. Who is ‘looking after the countryside’ now?
*As a footnote on the issue of meat exports being made a little more difficult if we vaccinated cattle, we actually import substantially more beef than we export. We exported 163,000 tonnes in 2019, and imported 315,000 tonnes. Am I cynical to suspect that the exports were of expensive high quality beef and the imports were to make cheap burgers? If so we could solve the export issue by tackling income inequality. Then we might all be able to afford to eat our own beef.
**Prof. Dave Goulson, University of Sussex: “The bigger challenge is farming – 70% of Britain is farmland. No matter how many gardens we make wildlife friendly, if 70% of the countryside remains largely hostile to life, then we are not going to turn around insect decline.”
Brilliant piece Richard. So lovely to read your childhood badgerings and to have that laid up beside such well researched and articulated insight into farming practice. Poor buggers.
Excellent article. Thank you.
(wondered what "quists" were, but after a wee bit of searching found they're what I would call "cushie doos")