ABOUT BADGERS
By SIR JOCELYN LUCAS, M.P.
BADGERS were among the animals the hunting of which was to be prohibited under the recent Blood Sports Bill to which the House of Commons declined to give a second reading. So they will still be hunted, and their numbers thus kept down, but there is little danger of their being exterminated. How many badgers there are in Great Britain no one knows, for no census has been taken or official estimate made, but they are certainly more numerous than most people think. My own guess would put them at anything between 25,000 and too,000.
The badger, the only surviving member of the bear tribe in this country (The Shooting Times told recently of a poultry-keeper who sat up to deal with what he thought was a fox, and fired point blank at something which, never having seen a badger before, he imagined to be a bear), is nocturnal in his habits, lives underground, often hibernates for part of the winter, normally weighs anything from 18 to 32 lb., likes wasps in season and is quite immune to their stings (so long as he keeps his eyes shut) owing to the thickness of his hide. In the matter of diet he is specially partial to young rabbits. He does no particular harm, apart from digging up lawns in the search for grubs and beetles, or devouring pheasants' eggs or rolling in fields of corn, to the great detriment of the harvest. On the other band what are known as " rogue " badgers are caught every now and then raiding hen-houses. Indeed a good deal of the harm done to poultry and lambs attributed to foxes may, in fact, be the work of badgers.
As I have said, the badger lives underground. His " sett " or earth may be a comparatively small one, for breeding, or it may be a kind of block of residential flats where badgers have been living for centuries. Setts of this type may cover as much as two or three acres in extreme cases, and almost invariably have three floors or storeys. There are certain to be a number of entrances, though pro- bably only three or four are much used. Every four or five feet along the underground passage there is an" oven," or chamber, where the animals sleep or play or presumably pass one another. Whereas a fox-earth commonly smells of carrion, the badger is a cleanly beast, and in the summer at any rate he brings out his bed of reeds and fern to air. His sett is normally sited in some wooded hillside, reasonably close to a stream where he can drink. Runways through the brambles or over the pine-needles are clearly marked at quite a distance from the setts, showing the way the badger takes on his nocturnal forays.
Relatively harmless though the badger—or brock—is, it may some- times be necessary to keep his numbers in a particular locality down. For that a variety of methods present themselves—shooting, trapping, snaring, poison, gas, digging and hunting by night. Consider them for a moment in that order. Shooting a wary and nocturnal animal is by no means easy. It is possible that on a moonlight night a keeper watching for the badger to emerge from his den may get in a shot, but a shot among trees and brambles at midnight is no simple matter, and if the animal is not missed altogether it is more likely to get wounded than killed. And to think of a wounded badger dragging itself off to die slowly is not pleasant.
Then there is trapping. The French say you can sometimes lure a badger to where you want him by drawing a piece of pork along, to make a trail which he will find irresistible. I have no experience of this, and anyhow you cannot get the roast pork nowadays. Normally the badger is so wary that if there is a human scent on one of his runways he will go off on another road, and his nose is so keen that he will scent you for a week or more afterwards. It follows, there- fore, that if a steel trap is 'set in a runway you must not go back to look at it for at least a fortnight, and if an unfortunate badger, or other animal, is caught by the leg he may be there suffering agony for days before he is found. Unless the trap is very strong and well- secured he will get away with it on his leg. A case occurred quite recently of a car running over a badger with a trap on it. The badger was not much hurt by the car, but it had to be killed because no one could get near it to get the trap off. If the trap is set in the pouch of his hole the badger will either bury it or spring it by
rolling over it, so that all that is left to show are a few hairs off his back. On the other hand a keeper told me that he once set traps this way, and it was three months before hunger drove the badger out. I myself once dug three fat badgers from a small earth that had been closed and blocked seventeen days before. Trapping seems ruled out on the grounds both of cruelty and of ineffectiveness.
As for snares, poison and gas, snares will catch badgers, but they bite through the wire and get away with the noose drawn tight round their necks. It rarely strangles them, but in time cuts through the skin, and must cause intense pain. To poison a badger would usually be extremely difficult, for he is too wary an animal, but the result might well be to poison something else. In any event I am not going to give any hints about a method which I personally detest. Gassing might work in a small or rocky earth, but in the ordinary sett the badger would wall himself in, and either lie buried for days or even weeks or else try to dig another way out. Nor is gas always effective. A man told me that he once tried to gas five badgers in a closed room for the sake of their skins. The next day the room was full of gas, but all five had their noses to the crack under the door, and all five were alive. He was so upset that he let them go. I think gassing is in the main of little use, and is almost invariably cruel.
There remains digging and hunting. Badger-digging has the advantage that you can take the badgefs alive and unhurt and release them elsewhere where they are scarce and are promised a sanctuary. If they must be killed, it can be done humanely, with a pistol or with a blow on the nose with a crowbar. If it is intended to dig an earth it must not be visited for some days beforehand or the chances are that the badgers will either be elsewhere or dug in when you come.
The chief requisites for a dig are good terriers who will throw their tongues continually when they find the badger, so that the diggers know where to dig. It is of little use digging without preparation, because the badger gives battle nea' the entrance of his sett and will shift his ground each time you start. It is better to hit the ground with a spade each time you hear the dog, till a steady baying tells you that the badger has settled down in his reserve trenches. The only time the dog should close in is when the badger turns to dig himself in, and to put a wall of earth between himself and the dog. Once he does this, only an old and experienced dog can find the badger again, and he is probably lost. This is when the dog should close in and nip Brock on the rump. He cannot hurt him, but the badger will turn and charge into the open.
If you are keen on terrier work you may love it, but it can be very boring. It can also be very exciting. A dig may last two hours, or three days in a big sett. You may have to tunnel into a hillside, or you may be lucky and corner half-a-dozen badgers up a pipe not too far down, perhaps fifty yards away from the main earth. Experienced dogs rarely get bitten except at the end of a dig when they are over-excited, so they should be caught up and restrained.
When you get your badgers, put them in a loose box for the night, with a strong floor. Give them whatever food you give your dogs, a pile of straw in the corner, and some water to drink. They will often eat the first night, always the second, and I have given a badger a drink within five minutes of capture. They are easily tamed and like plum cake. Some setts are impregnable, so the badgers must be hunted if they are to be reduced in numbers. Badger hunting by moonlight in the autumn can be anything from a rag where everyone brings a dog of sorts and no one gets hurt, to a more serious affair with a few couples of old foxhounds. The idea is to lay on the pack when the badger is away on his nightly forage and hunt him above ground. Terriers are unlikely to catch him, but foxhounds may well do so. The trouble is that few hounds will tackle a badger, and if they set him at bay you get a devil's chorus. If it is necessary to kill the badger, a man must do it, not a dog, Brock can defend himself well, his skin is impervious to bites, and his aose is his only vulnerable point.
Badgers have survived centuries of attack, and I hope that War Agricultural Committees and County Pest Officers will not be too zealous in their destruction. Control may be necessary, but extermination would be a crime.
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