• Badgers This month’s magical creature
AN APPRECIATION OF THE BADGER
When the nose first materialises beyond the dark hole, it imbibes the air like a sommelier, testing the dusk for notes of promise and danger. Sometimes it withdraws, and there’s a hollow thud of movement back underground. At other times it circles some more, inches forward, and then reveals that famous black-and-white striped face, followed by a broad but strangely sinuous grey body.
When I saw my first wild badger without car headlights, I was stunned by its exoticism. The beast snuffling around its sett in a scrubby patch of Wolverhampton canalside was as charismatic and vivid as a zebra. We see plenty of badger corpses on busy verges but the live animal is crepuscular and elusive. It has to be to stay alive. Its mystery may be why our sense of it swings so wildly from love to loathing.
We have driven more formidable beasts to extinction in Britain – bear, wolf, lynx – but the badger endures, despite being treated appallingly for a millennium. The verb ‘to badger’ comes from our relentless hounding of this animal. An Anglo-Saxon poem describes a badger being hunted by a dog. The 19th century poet John Clare wrote of an entire village conspiring to torture a badger. Baiting continues as a bizarre, illegal subculture to this day.
Our relations with the badger were transformed in 1908, when the secretary of the Bank of England quit his job to devote his life to writing: Kenneth Grahame published
The Wind in the Willows. His classic tale contains British culture’s first unequivocally positive portrayal of a badger. Mr Badger is the moral core of the story – noble, righteous, a leader of the animals, and his sett is a homely sanctuary.
Now we’re indoctrinated in childhood to love badgers. The badger’s face is a design icon, the symbol for everything from nature reserves to real ales. And in 1973 it became the first British land mammal to gain specific legal protection. Today, the badger and its setts are still protected in law, although its population has doubled in 20 years.
Like us, they are an adaptable, increasingly suburban, omnivorous mammal. But some carry bovine TB and are blamed for infecting cows, triggering a cull that has killed more than 35,000 English badgers over five years. This cull is rich in bitter ironies. The main source of cattle TB is other cows. And we are, in effect, farming badgers – growing more maize, on which they fatten up for winter; and providing cattle pastures rich in earthworms ( badgers can devour hundreds a night, sucking them up like spaghetti).
The badger is neither hero nor villain, but simply a success story, and a tribute to its tenacity. And I’m thankful for one of the most exhilarating pieces of nature theatre: sitting in a woodland at dusk, waiting for a badger to reveal a glimpse of its sniffing, trotting, gambolling secret life.
Patrick Barkham is the author of Badgerlands (Granta)