Why British badgers fear the Beeb
Canadian researcher finds human voices scare the animals more than dogs, bears
Armed with a speaker system and a bucket full of peanuts, wildlife ecologist Liana Zanette hiked into the Wytham Woods with just one mission: to terrorize some woodland creatures with recordings of the BBC.
For five nights, she broadcast snippets of BBC documentaries and news programs — as well as clips from CBC radio’s Quirks and Quarks and the audiobook of The Wind in the Willows — to a forest full of unsuspecting English badgers. She and her colleagues then monitored the animals’ response to the sounds to measure how much they feared humans.
“Oh, I don’t want to be dissing public radio and television,” Zanette hurriedly insisted when I asked whether she thought the BBC was frightening. She laughed. “I had all these clips on hand because it’s what I love to listen to.”
Zanette, a professor at Western University in London, Ont., has spent much of her career studying “the landscape of fear” — how animals’ anxiety about getting eaten by predators shapes their behaviour and, in turn, shapes the ecosystem in which they live. She’s used a similar methodology at least a dozen times before. Then, last year, she read a study in Science claiming that humans had become a “super-predator,” killing mesocarnivores such as badgers four times as much as nonhuman predators do.
“So badgers should be really afraid of us,” Zanette said.
Based on the results of her experiment in the Wytham Woods, an English forest near the University of Oxford, they certainly are. When confronted with two hours of BBC footage, the majority of badgers stayed hidden inside their burrows, waiting for the human sounds to vanish. Those that did venture out to a food patch (a bucket peanuts prepared by the scientists) were watchful and hesitant. By comparison, the animals showed no response to audio of howling wolves, which once preyed on badgers but were driven to extinction in the U.K. about five centuries ago. They reacted slightly to sounds of bears and to dogs. And when subjected to sounds of a control group, sheep, the badgers quite sensibly ignored the braying and chowed down.
“It’s really quite extraordinary,” Zanette said of the results, which were published in Behavioral Ecology last month. “We weren’t expecting this massive response.”
Technically speaking, badgers should have nothing to fear from people. They are a protected species in Britain. But it’s estimated that 10,000 British badgers are killed every year for “sports” such as badger baiting and digging. And a 2013 survey found that one in eight British farmers kill badgers each year.
Dan Blumstein, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, called the study “eye-opening.”
“They take the methodology that has been used to ask questions about how animals respond to predators, and then throw in people. The insight to me is that, of course, why not ask that question?” he said.
Blumstein, who wrote an entire book on animal fear and escaping from predators, noted that scientists have spent years studying how fear can impact ecosystems.
The most famous case study took place in Yellowstone, where wolves were reintroduced in the mid-1990s. Within a few years, the park’s elk and bison had dramatically changed their behaviour to account for the fearsome new predator. They spent more time watching and listening for wolves, rather than eating, and were less likely to forage in open areas. That in turn led to the recovery of trees those herbivores once chewed on, which allowed for the re-emergence of beavers and songbirds.
In this way, “restoring the fear of a top predator has all these cascading effects on other tiers in the food chain,” Zanette explained. “Restoring fear can actually restore the ecosystem.”
If that’s the case, then isn’t it a good thing that creatures like badgers are petrified of humans? Not quite, Zanette warned.
“It’s not a one-to-one relationship,” she said. We may be scaring badgers, but we’re also killing their predators, providing them with new sources of food like crops and trash, and reshaping their habitats. Zanette said much more study is needed to understand the cascading effects of this new landscape of fear.