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We Relearned To Love Nature In Lockdown, But Our Government Isn’t Protecting It For Us

In lockdown I turned into a regular wildlife peeping Tom. With remote cameras all around the farmland I’m lucky enough to live on, I spied on the swallows fledging under my deck, the fox that owns our local lanes, and the swans nesting in my neighbour’s garden.

My obsession, though, was our badger sett. Almost every day I’d take my little boy to wander round the bluebells and beech trees, setting up cameras to pry into their secret world. The following day we’d wake up like it was Christmas morning, and catch up with our badgers as they got bolder and hungrier. We gasped together with joy when two cubs finally emerged.

This little monochrome clan became an extended part of my own family. On nights where one cub didn’t show we’d be distraught, desperate to find out no tragedy had befallen them. Badgers have it pretty hard in the British countryside. They’re about to have it a whole lot harder.

Despite the British government’s March commitment to end the controversial culling of badgers in favour of vaccination programs, they have now reneged on that promise, granting licences for thousands more badgers to be killed. As president of my region’s Wildlife Trust, I think it important to clarify why so many are vehemently opposed to this new cull.

First, it’s not because I’m a precious environmentalist snowflake who doesn’t understand how the countryside works. Granted, the fact I consider four local badgers that I’ve only ever seen on CCTV as family may mark me as a sentimentalist. But let’s talk about why it’s important to have them in our countryside.

Blasting away at any visible badgers hoping they’re infected just makes the problem worse. Transpose this methodology to a certain human disease and you’ll get a sense of quite how bonkers this is.

The definitive study on badgers and bovine TB is the 196-page Krebs report. It was carried out with data collated from the Randomised Badger Culling Trial 1998-2007, by an impartial group...

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