A hundred years after the opening of St. Pancras station, now the flashy London home of the Eurostar, a narrow strip of land opposite the train tracks near Regent’s Canal had fallen into disrepair. Once a polluted coal drop, by the nineteen-seventies, the two acres of open space had become an abandoned wasteland. Then nature took over. Or, humans helped nature take over. Trash was cleared. Trees were planted. Butterflies, dragonflies, and birds returned, and, in 1985, the area reopened as Camley Street Natural Park. In the summer, on a commuting detour, you might see a moorhen, or a reed warbler, or a kingfisher. Not long ago, I visited the park to speak with the campaigner Peter Hambly. Visibility was scarce. It was raining, and we huddled over mugs of tea under a canvas tent in the outdoor café. “It’s just a wet patch of wildflowers now,” Hambly said, looking out. We were there to talk about badgers.
The European badger: industrious, nocturnal, nattily dressed in black-and-white stripes. Larger and more elegant than his American cousin, he carries with him an air of respectability. In Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” Bill Murray voices Clive Badger, an upstanding attorney at the offices of Badger, Beaver & Beaver; in “The Wind in the Willows,” Mr. Badger smokes a pipe and wears a waistcoat. Because the U.K.’s bigger carnivores—the wolf, the bear—have been killed off, the badger is the country’s largest land predator. He is also, lately, a politicized figure—a lightning rod for debate among those who profess to care about the British countryside. In England, since 2013, an estimated two hundred and fifty thousand badgers—roughly half of the known population in England and Wales—have been killed. The badger cull, as it is called, is part of a government-backed plan to reduce bovine tuberculosis, or bTB, in cattle. When a cow contracts bTB, its meat cannot be exported. The question is: Who’s to blame?
There are strong opinions on all sides. If you ask certain dairy farmers and officials, many will point to the badger as a factor in spreading the disease. This past summer, on the campaign trail ahead of the U.K.’s general election, Rishi Sunak, the former Conservative Prime Minister, pledged to keep killing badgers and told a farmer in Devon that “culls have to be part of the solution” in ending bovine tuberculosis. Others maintain the badger’s innocence. The Labour Party promised in its election manifesto to work with farmers and scientists to “end the ineffective badger cull.” Celebrities got involved. Brian May, the Queen guitarist, released a BBC documentary, “Brian May: The Badgers, The Farmers, and Me,” about his campaign to end violence against badgers. Meanwhile, the former “Top Gear” host Jeremy Clarkson, who is trying his hand at farming on his Amazon show, “Clarkson’s Farm,” devoted an entire episode to the importance of eradicating badgers, at one point wondering if they could be hit “with a hammer.”
Hambly, who is head of the nonprofit group the Badger Trust, believes those in favor of the cull are mistaken. “The badger has always been a scapegoat,” he told me on the day we met. He was wearing glasses, and spoke softly. “There’s been crime against badgers since medieval times.” People used to fill in the vast underground tunnels, or setts, where badgers make their homes, or dig the animals up and make them fight dogs, a practice known as badger baiting. (In some areas of England, they still do.) Earlier that day, Hambly had been at a wildlife-crime conference. Speaking to him, you get the sense that badgers are everywhere. He pointed to the café awning behind us, onto which a badger had been printed. He unzipped his rain jacket to show me an embroidered badger face—the symbol of the Badger Trust—on his T-shirt. “Gorgeous-looking creatures,” he said.
How did the badger get dragged into this mess in the first place? The species’s presence in the U.K. dates back at least two hundred and fifty thousand years, and has inspired whimsical reverence—badgers appear across children’s literature and cartoons, on holiday ornaments, and as beloved mascots—and extreme loathing. In Britain, bovine tuberculosis has plagued cattle and dairy farmers since the eighteen-hundreds. Cows that contract the disease must be slaughtered, at significant cost to the farmer. The government then compensates farmers for their losses, a bill ultimately footed by the taxpayer. In the nineteen-seventies, when badgers were found to be infected with bTB, people turned on them in earnest. J’accuse! Sporadic culls were carried out between the seventies and the nineties. Badgers were gassed, or trapped in cages and shot. Sometimes, the culls were abandoned along the way. It was difficult work, and it wasn’t clear that it was helping.
Then, in 2006, a group of independent scientists published a landmark study—the Randomised Badger Culling Trial—on the effects of the badger cull, across nearly a decade, on the spread of bovine tuberculosis. It is fairly damning. It showed that though infections in cattle within culling areas decreased, they surged in the surrounding areas. Researchers hypothesized that this was because of the “perturbation effect.” Harassed badgers, who normally socialize in territorial clans, were migrating to new sites, carrying the disease with them. The study also found that while badgers could infect cows, cows could also infect badgers, and one another. Indeed, much of the transmission was happening cattle-to-cattle. The scientists concluded that the cull was ineffective, and advised officials in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to focus on the cows, and leave the badger out of it.
The case would seem to have closed there. Cows: 0. Badgers: 1. Oddly, however, the study has not dispelled arguments for the cull. (It did show a reduction of the disease in some areas, after all). In 2010, the Conservative Party, led by David Cameron, won the general election, and suddenly the badger cull was back on the table. It was popular among farmers, many of whom believed it worked. Intensive culling began again in 2013. The badgers are no longer gassed, they are mostly now lured into fields at night and shot by specialist teams of exterminators. The process is expensive: thousands of pounds per badger killed, by some estimates. Lately, proponents of the cull have pointed to a 2023 study by researchers from the Animal and Plant Health Agency, which seemed to show a reduction in bovine tuberculosis.
Supporters of the badger have many rebuttals. They point out that the 2023 study doesn’t differentiate between the cull and other methods used to reduce the disease, such as improved cattle testing and biosecurity. There is evidence that the disease is spread through waste from infected cows, and that badgers account for only a small percentage of the transmission. “The main source of new infection in cattle is cattle to cattle transmission,” John Krebs, a former president of the British Science Association, who had recommended setting up the Randomised Badger Culling Trial, told me. “Badger culling is not the answer.” It might reduce the disease in cattle a little, he said, but “it will not result in eliminating T.B., which is the government aim.” The most compelling argument that the cull doesn’t work, though, might be that Wales has similar rates of the disease, but doesn’t kill its badgers. Scotland, likewise, doesn’t cull and has virtually no infections.
In August, the new Labour government announced plans to end the badger cull by 2029. The Badger Trust was not overly impressed. Many more badgers will be killed by then. “They still mention badgers an awful lot in their communications rather than focus on cattle,” Hambly told me. “The politicians still seem intimidated by the power of the farming lobby, who are obsessed with focussing on badgers.” Hambly suggested it might be easier for some farmers to blame the badger than to make certain changes to the way they do business, including increased cattle testing and vaccination. (In a statement, the National Farmers’ Union’s president, Tom Bradshaw said, “Peer-reviewed scientific papers show that targeted badger culling provides success and has a part to play in a strategy where there is evidence that it is the right tool to contain and reduce TB.”) In September, the Badger Trust staged a protest outside of Parliament in which several people dressed as badgers.
