A badger eats, squats, thieves. But should we cull them?

Lord Arran was responsible for the bill to legalise homosexuality and a bill to protect badgers from gassing and terrier-baiting. One, he said, had stopped people badgering buggers; the other stopped them buggering badgers. The Homosexuality Act had an easier passage through the Lords. ‘Not many badgers in the House of Lords,’ he observed.

The badger, Meles meles, a chunky member of the weasel family, is our largest native carnivore, with huge, powerful claws and a ridge on its skull. Familiarly
known as ‘Brock’, its history in these islands is chequered. For centuries, badger-baiting was a sport openly pursued by whole villages: in the 1830s John Clare’s remorseless poem ‘The Badger’ describes a day’s fun with an animal turned loose in the street:

He turns again and drives the noisey crowd
And beats the many dogs in noises loud
He drives away and beats them every one
And then they loose them all and set
them on
He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men
Then starts and grins and drives the crowd
again
Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies
And leaves his hold and crackles, groans and
dies.

By the mid-20th century badger numbers were low: they lived alone in large complex setts and were regularly persecuted by farmers and by terrier-fanciers from the large conurbations. In Badgerlands, the author of The Butterfly Isles suggests that badgers started to make a comeback when Kenneth Grahame created the character of Badger in The Wind in the Willows, a striped humbug of squirish manners.

Beatrix Potter’s anti-hero Tommy Brock had appeared just a few years earlier in The Tale of Mr Todd, a sinister and gutsy depiction of country life compared to Grahame’s Ideal Home Exhibition version. Potter, as a countrywoman, had a place for the badger in her natural scheme, but few illusions about his character: Brock eats anything, thieves, squats dens and is a vicious brute when cornered.