don’t talk about Badger Club

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It takes nerve to challenge badger baiters. They are brutal men. Some are serious criminals. Darren Russell is matter-of-fact about it: “Someone has to stand up for badgers,” he says. “Not enough people do.”

The den is not in some Straw Dogs-style rural hell. It is in a wood beside a housing estate in south London. Badgers are surprisingly common in British towns and cities. But they are secretive and rarely seen.

Russell showed me a shallow pit in the side of a bank honeycombed with badger tunnels. It is the top of a shaft, now filled in. The diggers had got down about 6ft when he and a friend confronted them. The aim of the hunters was to break into a main tunnel and put dogs in to drive out a badger to kill at leisure.

“We told them we knew what they were doing and they packed up sharpish,” says Russell, who is Bromley field officer for the West Kent Badger Group. “They knew we’d call the police.” Despite a huge government-sanctioned cull in England since 2013, badger setts are protected by law in the UK.

I had come to meet Russell in the cause of self-education. I had always thought of badgers as country dwellers. Then I noticed a spoil heap erupt among the brambles in a London park where I sometimes walk.

I found a dozen burrows a few yards from a busy footpath. Thousands of people use the park every week. Here, hiding in plain sight, was a similar sett, but in an urban location.

I was thrilled. While my parents were living, I often visited a large and ancient sett near their Cumbrian home. Some nights I would shin up a tree and watch the badgers. As darkness fell, the animals would tumble out of their tunnels, romp noisily in the undergrowth, then disperse to forage for earthworms.

There is a reassuring solidity to the badger, with its black-and-white striped head and rolling gait. Kenneth Grahame characterised the animal as an amiable country gent in The Wind in the Willows. English place names such as Brockenhurst and Brockhall acknowledge the presence of “brocks”, as they were once called.

But in my park, humbug-striped mustelids are omitted from a signboard entitled “Animals you can see here”.

I asked local naturalists about the badgers. They were evasive. This was a little comical. Adult badgers weigh 10kg-12kg. There must be at least a dozen living in the park sett. They have displaced several tonnes of soil and changed the local topography. It all reminded me of the old kids’ joke: “How can you tell if you have elephants in your fridge? From the footprints in the butter.”

I was learning the first rule of Badger Club: don’t talk about the badgers.

I knew badger baiters were a problem in the countryside. They attacked a sett near the one I used to watch. The landowner concreted the top of the den to discourage diggers. It transpires badgers are vulnerable in towns and cities too. Captives are valuable as high-stakes illegal betting propositions. “The aim is to see how many dogs it takes to kill the badger,” Russell says.

You can only protect animals if you know where they are. During a pandemic furlough, Russell recorded every sett on public land in his borough. He showed me his private map on his laptop. He pressed a key and markers popped up pinpointing the location of some 70 setts. There must be many more in private gardens.

There is a theory badgers are expanding into cities as foxes have. Conclusive proof is lacking. “There is a lot we do not know about badgers,” says Hannah Dugdale, a biology professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. She adds: “They are so difficult to study because they are highly nocturnal and they live underground.”

An alternative hypothesis would be that badgers have clung on in green spaces for centuries as settlements have expanded round them. They have been protected, in part, by an Omertà among local naturalists. Ernest Neal acknowledged this in his seminal 1948 monograph The Badger.

Brocks can be a nuisance for gardeners. They eat bulbs and dig up lawns looking for worms. In towns and cities, they may depend on rations left out by friendly householders — typically dogfood and peanuts. Some ecologists disapprove. My feeling is that English badgers need all the help they can get.

Russell illustrates the issue by zooming his map out to show numerous locations across England where culling is under way. Badgers can play a subsidiary role in transmitting tuberculosis between cattle herds. The government hopes to end the cull by pursuing a new disease eradication strategy.

In the meantime, exterminators plan to destroy 75,000 badgers this year and next. They have already killed around 230,000, according to Peter Hambly, chief executive of the Badger Trust.

Culling is taking a big bite out of a current population of some 400,000 English badgers. Top scientists, notably Lord Krebs, emeritus professor of zoology at the University of Oxford, do not support the cull. An onerous official regime for checking cattle depends on a test that fails to spot 20-25 per cent of infected livestock. Farming, biodiversity and a nature-loving public are being very poorly served by politicians.

Badger baiters demonstrate callous indifference to animal welfare at a merely local level. Westminster is doing it with a much grander sweep.

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