Badgers are beautiful
Auberon Waugh
tend that it is sweet or cuddly. Although its white-striped face and stubby tail (which covers a stink gland of enormous power, used, apparently. for the purpose of attracting mates rather than repelling enemies) proclaim its general benignity, one would not be tempted to pat a badger on the head, as one might a puppy or a piccaninny. There is a certain independence about the badger which discourages such familiarity.
Since 1975, between 10,000 and 15,000 of these rare and mysterious creatures have been wiped out by the Ministry of Agriculture. The reason given was that badgers tend to harbour a form of tuberculosis which, it was feared, might spread to cattle, although there was never any danger of its spreading from cattle to humans, since pasteurisation of milk kills the bacteria. Recently, there has been evidence that the Ministry's programme of badger destruction has done nothing to halt the spread of bovine tuberculosis.
The most startling thing about this policy of exterminating the badger is that any Ministry can be so cut off from the rest of the country as to suppose it can get away with it. There are, I suppose, about 55 million people in this country of whom about five million care passionately about badgers. Some, if not most of them, are silly, and practically none of them shares my own fierce pride in being the patron and protector of two badger setts. But almost the whole of contemporary morality, to the extent that there is a contemporary morality, has swung behind the badger. Given the choice between more cows (never mind more unwanted milk) and saving the badger, about 90 per cent of the population would opt for saving the badger.
If ever Mr Jopling and his dim, snuffling advisers were to succeed in exterminating the badger entirely, they would find their names in every school history book of the future as among the greatest criminals of contemporary history. The ecological movement is something far, far bigger than a few extra gallons of unwanted milk. If ever Mrs Thatcher listened to my advice, I should advise the foolish woman to stop worrying about the Belgrano, which everybody agrees was well sunk, and start worrying about these badgers. She may not be aware of it, but she is about to be landed with the Crime of the Century.
This is an edited version of a piece in The Spectator, 22 September 1984.
Previous page
