In his final Blog Eddie Palmer, Chairman of the charity Scottish Badgers talks about Badger Baiting.

BADGER BLOG 5

BADGER BAITING, WHAT IT IS, AND WHY DOES IT HAPPEN?

 We really need to talk about deliberate harm to badgers, because you might just come across it, and not realise what it is.

The reaction of people is very much one of horror, as if we have exposed a deep and raw wound in faith in humankind  – it is unknown, horrible and shocking.

However, the majority of countryside workers, gamekeepers, shooters and hunts employees see, and describe ‘badger baiters’ as a separate entity – they are a sub-human species arising from old working class traditions, often in mining areas, and not like ‘real countrymen’ (notice ‘men’ – very few, or no women seem to be included in this).

However, the truth, I’m afraid, is proven by the evidence – phone footage from criminals, illustrated in the tiny number of cases prosecuted, placed on either private Facebook sites, or as U-tube videos, (they all do it) shows first of all a huge geographical range – it will be from every local authority area in the UK, urban or rural, and crossing every type of occupation – nobody is excluded.

The baiters just cannot wait to share their experience with everybody.  The perpetrators as known include estate workers, farm workers, gamekeepers, shooters, huntsmen, and I could go on. Some of the evidence seized in cases already having come to court also point to very nasty porn also being sampled. I make no comment on that.

So what do baiters do? Well, there are changing fashions  – broadly, to get a badger out of  a sett, a terrier with a radio collar is put down, corners the badger, as shown by the signal, and the badger dug out  which could take all day or all night.

The badger is then either baited there and then, near the sett, or taken away to have ‘a fight’ in another place, maybe a barn or a town pub. The badger is always torn apart, and dies.

The main issue here is not the badger, although it is seen as a worthy adversary – it is a test of the dog. Quite horrifying cross- breeds have emerged over the years, and the winning dog is the one which can kill more badgers, more quickly. Betting does take place, but it also seems to be a side show,

Also, in the past, it appears (and is recorded by some past offenders) that it was a badge of honour to take only one badger per. sett, and then move on, so there were animals left for a visit in a year’s time.  Not now, there are reports of all badgers in a sett being killed so that the population is even more affected.

Some baiters can’t be bothered to dig – instead , they stay mobile in 4 x 4s, and look, in open countryside for badgers moving around at night, and hunt them down.

The effect of such dangerous dogs in any community are also far-reaching. When there is news of a child, sadly, being killed in a house by a dog, it can be a sure bet that this was not a ‘pet’.

If you’re wondering how this happens, a convicted baiter has to keep a dog somewhere, and they are often banned from dog-owning – so the dog goes to whichever household can take it, with often the ‘new owner’ not happy about it. This is where mothers, aunts, any non-suspicious relative, has a role.

So, at the end of this I’m sure some of you are wondering – ‘Why do they do it?’. The answer, as ever, can be complicated. The phenomenon seems to be often around people living in both deprived and isolated communities, with a poor educational level,

limited life opportunities, and also very fixed beliefs. This group just cannot appear to make the jump to realise that the rest of society has very different beliefs. This is also a symptom of the beliefs held by those to whom talking about any countryside issue can be a problem.

Let’s look at the Donald Trump supporters, and their beliefs about the last US election. They truly thought, and believed that the election was rigged – yet, plain common sense would tell us that this would have entailed thousands of American civil servants actually ‘cooking the results’ – likely?

The psychological state of such persons is very likely to be overshadowed by fear – fear of change, a constant anxiety that their lives, with attendant customs, habits, mores, will be swept away.

James Rebanks, in ‘English Pastoral’ covers this nicely; ‘I’ve come to realise that we also need a small army of naturalists to help us play our part in the restoration of the countryside. There is more to understand about the ecology of the farm than any farmer can reasonably be expected to know.’ What he was coming up against was ‘The big ‘modernising farmers’…had been educated in agricultural colleges.. and were

‘businessmen’ engaged in a desperate race to be the survivors, as everyone else fell behind, gave up and stopped farming. They were ruthless capitalists.’

A final word from a psychologist writing about climate change and its effect on humans

(Elspeth Stirling, ‘The ecological collapse and what we can do about it’, in https://www.bps.org.uk/member-microsites/division-clinical-psychology/climate-change

‘How did we get into this mess?

For long the relationship between humans and nature has been one of control. Humans were seen as separate from nature and nature seen as an infinitely exploitable commodity to be managed, poisoned, burned, slashed, drained, extracted and displaced to suit our needs – on occasion, one species at a time is given attention to be ‘saved’ if the species is deemed of value. 

The outcome has been that those ‘pesky’ species including larger predators, insects and invertebrates that have little obvious value or meaning to humans have been deliberately or carelessly dispatched – in what some have called “a War on Wildlife” – while less threatening, ‘iconic’ species that fit more tidily into the human-engineered landscape are granted conditional permission to be hosted on “our” land. 

Traditional conservation sees the relationship between humans and nature as being one of control.  Human interventions are applied to protect a selected range of habitats and species where species are considered single entities – the Noah’s Ark approach as some have described it. Despite successes in protecting some species pools and maintaining a degree of connectivity of habitats we nonetheless are left with a largely sterilised natural world – that has depleted resilience to combat the impacts of the fires, floods, droughts and violent atmospheric events that we will increasingly experience. The UK is one of the most nature depleted countries in the world (WWF, 2020)’. So – what a mix; catastrophic climate change/nature decline/rigid thinking!