On the badger war front line
Gunmen armed with peanuts. Saboteurs who know nothing about the animals they claim to love. An extraordinary dispatch from DAVID JONES . . .
AT HER insistence, we met not on some quiet lane at dead of night, but on a midweek afternoon in the most anonymous place imaginable: the car park of a Budgens supermarket. Emerging from her black Peugeot with carrier bags, she looked — as intended — like any other woman doing her midweek shopping.
Slightly built and in her 40s, with jam-jar spectacles and a ponytail, her manner was diffident, her accent soft and middle-class. Even her uniform of combat fatigues and sturdy boots didn’t seem out of place in this rural West Country town, busy with summer hikers.
In the ranks of the undercover animal rights brigade, the ability to appear ordinary is an essential art, and this woman — who called herself ‘Lynne’ and, I later discovered, holds down a responsible job in one of the caring professions — was clearly well-practised.
Her car boot was stuffed not with groceries but the tools she needs for her latest struggle: a sleeping bag and high-powered torch, wire- cutters, Ordnance Survey maps, bottles of water and ready- to- eat meals (strictly vegan, of course).
And soon we were leaving the car park and driving deep into the Forest of Dean, there to comb the scenic hills and fields for baited cages and wire-traps, and later, as dusk fell, for men armed with rifles.
For Lynne is the co-ordinator of a cell of likeminded fanatics hell-bent on preventing thousands of badgers being culled in Somerset and Gloucestershire. And since last Monday, when she hastily took leave from work to mastermind the operation, she has been living in the filthy Peugeot, grabbing a few hours’ sleep on the back seat as she scours the countryside for detested ‘shooters’.
A veteran hunt saboteur, she already has had ‘several’ brushes with the law, a fact she confided once trust had been established between us.
If and when she locates her new enemies, the badger cullers, Lynn is prepared to go to any extreme — even placing herself between their guns and the creature caught in their telescopic night-sights — if it means saving its life.
‘Would I risk my safety to spare a badger? Of course!’ she exclaimed, as though the very question were ridiculous. ‘Who else will defend them?
‘Anyway, imagine what would happen if the cullers knowingly shot a person! Then they would be in some trouble, wouldn’t they?
‘But I don’t think they would risk that. They’d rather run away.’
Ordinarily, Lynne confines her activities to the West Midlands, where she lives, but when it was confirmed that the cull had begun she hastily headed south, along with hundreds of other animal rights activists.
During the next six weeks they will attempt to prevent 5,000 of the creatures being shot in a government pilot scheme aimed at eradicating the spread of bovine tuberculosis from badgers to cattle.
Scientists predict that this pilot scheme, being conducted in two ‘cull-zones’ spanning more than 300 square miles, will reduce the disease by at least 16 per cent. Should they be proved right, Britain’s 300,000 badgers could be culled annually across the country.
Slaughtering sick cattle costs taxpayers £100 million a year. Given that 28,000 infected cattle had to be destroyed last year — and the numbers are steadily rising — farmers are overwhelmingly in favour of the cull. Many outside the industry feel likewise.
Albeit reluctantly, they accept the fact that although some 50,000 are killed each year by cars, badgers have no natural predators and breed prolifically.
Moreover, as Gloucestershire dairy farmer David Barton, who has lost 105 of his cows to bovine TB in the past decade, told me passionately: ‘These anarchists [the cull saboteurs] seem to think that they are the only ones who care about animals — but we care, too.
‘They might think cows are just slaughtered and don’t matter to farmers, but about one- third of my herd are kept for breeding and they will be on the farm for at least ten years. So it’s not just about money: the emotional side of losing them is the biggest cost.’
He stops to gather himself, then adds: ‘Anyway, what do these people propose to do about all the diseased badgers? It can take badgers up to five years to die of TB, coughing their lungs up.
‘If we treated our cows like that, the RSPCA would prosecute us. These anarchists don’t know the first thing about the countryside or animals.’
CERTAINLY, this seems true of eco-warrior Lynne. I ask her a series of questions as we patrol the ‘cull-zone’ — how long do badgers usually live; how many make up a typical family; do they hibernate? — to be met by a series of ‘not sure’ and ‘I’ll have to look that up’.
Her ignorance was disconcerting. It added to the sense that the act of sabotage was an end in it itself, and the creatures she purported to defend scarcely mattered.
Had she bothered to Google the badger before charging into battle, she might have learned the following: that it lives communally in huge setts whose tunnels can branch out for 300 yards or more, and which they build by shifting many tons of earth, digging it away with their powerful, long-clawed front legs.
Their lifespan is 14 years or more and they can weigh more than two stone. They are social animals, emerging at night to play and to forage for food.
They eat virtually anything, from wild fruit to hedgehogs, and even the occasional newborn lamb.
They also happen to be very partial to peanuts — a crucial fact, as I shall explain, and one that is not lost on the cullers, who plainly know far more about badgers than Lynne.
For obvious reasons, very few details about the cull are being released, but it has evidently been meticulously planned for many months by experts at DEFRA and Natural England.
First, they marked out all the active badger setts — 183 in the West Gloucestershire cull-zone and 275 in West Somerset — using GPS devices and maps.
Next, simple wood and wire traps were laid at sett entrances to catch the hairs of the resident badgers and use their DNA to create a profile for each individual.
Then, a few days ago, they began baiting the ground around the setts with peanuts, burying them in the soft soil about 30 yards from the entrances, so that when the badgers emerge to sniff out, unearth and eat their novel evening snack, they will be sufficiently far from the tunnels to give the gunmen time to sight and shoot them in the open.
On some farms, they will be stunned motionless by bright lights shone into their eyes before being dispatched with a bullet to the head. Others will be lured into wire cages before being shot.
THIS, however, is a more expensive and time-consuming method, and if, as Lynne claims, her cohorts have already found and removed some 90 cages in the Gloucestershire zone alone, it may become even more so.
In any event, it is clear that the cullers — a mix of game-keepers, farmers and other local marksmen, said to be directed by an Army officer and working for two companies specially set up to oversee the exercise, Gloscon and HNV Associates — have their work cut out.
Under the strict terms of the licence, they must kill all 5,000 badgers inside the allocated area within the six-week window. This not only means shooting more than 100 a day but also disposing of their remains — without allowing the saboteurs to inflame public opinion by finding and displaying the bloody carcasses.
Patrolling with Lynne on Wednesday afternoon, I saw first- hand the determined and resourceful opposition the cull team will face.
In the heart of the Gloucestershire cull-zone near the market town of Newent, we came upon a huge sett dug into a dried mud bank fringed by high nettles. On the hill behind it, where sheep grazed, soil had clearly been disturbed, and after scrabbling eagerly with her hands, Lynne whooped with joy as she unearthed fistfuls of peanuts.
Back at the car, she reached for her BlackBerry and reported the precise co-ordinates to some other badger warrior.
Another trap had been uncovered, either to be destroyed or to be watched through binoculars each evening then disrupted when the gunmen appeared.
Another tactic is that of checking the Land Registry to discover the identity of the farm owner — who must give his permission for culling to take place — then phoning to ‘reason’ with him, or calling on him personally and filming the impromptu visit.
Though Lynne assured me that she and her friends used only peaceful methods, this sort of unpleasant pressurising can make victims of people who have absolutely no part in the cull, as became evident when we began inquiries to uncover the owner of the baited sheep-field.
It belonged to a local woman who insisted she disagreed with badger culling but rented the field to a tenant farmer living nearby.
When we traced him, it transpired that although the targeted badger sett was indeed on his land, the peanuts had actually been laid on someone else’s.
Quite understandably the farmer taking part in the cull declined to comment, and we will not identify any of those involved.
Meanwhile, in West Somerset, the campaign has an even nastier edge. The dozen or so protesters who set up so-called Camp Badger on farmland near Minehead seemed harmless enough, but they have now been evicted.
This weekend, dozens more are
expected to converge on the county, creating a more menacing focal point for the campaign.
According to one of the ringleaders, Jay Tiernan (arrested this week after allegedly trying to break into a DEFRA depot believed to be supplying the badger traps), the new camp will probably be set up on Crown land near Taunton.
In Somerset, the cull area is large and despite nightly patrols — both by well-meaning villagers wearing fluorescent jackets and hardened anarchists from Bristol and other urban centres — by yesterday evening no one had a clue where, or if, the first badgers had been killed.
Among the saboteurs, the anger and frustration was palpable.
PERHAPS this is why, with their twisted morality, two shadowy groups calling themselves the Angry Foxes Cell and ACAB (All Coppers Are B******s) burnt down a new £ 16 million police firing range near Bristol, claiming this act in the name of the anti-cull campaign.
There were other worrying signs that hardcore elements have infiltrated the apparently peaceful umbrella protest movement, Stop The Cull, thus continuing a trend which has infected the anti-fracking movement and so many other environmental causes.
In defiance of a High Court injunction granted last week, which prevents campaigners approaching farmers and buildings involved in the cull, people have had their names, addresses and phone numbers posted on the internet and been plagued by late-night calls and abusive emails.
Some have had torches shone through their bedroom windows in the small hours.
This week, I learned that a distressed 74-year-old widow, who has never been involved with farming, is among those receiving menacing calls. ‘I try to tell them that I’m nothing to do with it, but they still call me “scum” and “murderer”,’ she said.
‘It’s been ever-so frightening. I’ve even thought of going to live with my son in Exeter.’
Why is she being targeted? She can only presume it is because her house was part of a farm some 60 years ago and still carries the word ‘farm’ in its listed address.
Whatever the reason, the use of such mean-spirited tactics supports the view that the saboteurs appear to care considerably more for the welfare of badgers than humans.
News that the cull had started six days ago was broken in a letter from the NFU to its members.
Assuming this means actual shooting had commenced, more than 500 badgers may have already been shot.
Lynne and her cronies prefer to believe that they are thwarting the cullers at every turn, and that, ultimately, they will win the struggle for a creature they profess to adore — even though they know no more about it than the average fourthform nature student.
But whoever is in the ascendancy, she told me resolutely, the battle for the badgers is only just beginning.
This was just ‘the phoney-war’, she said. Fixing me with another unnerving gaze, she added, with ill- concealed excitement: ‘It’s going to be a long, hard six weeks.’