The Badger as Geezer

When AC Grayling invites me to become a fellow of his private university, New College of Humanities, I intend to accept, though, like Richard Dawkins, I will only be in it for the money. I see a future for myself as a professor of Badger Studies. In the absence of a job, conventional hobby or social life, I would like to relate my findings on the portrayal of badgers in various media, and the impact of this woodland critter on the popular consciousness.

Unit 1. The Badger as Geezer.

Anyone who was a child in the early 90s has to be against the badger cull. To us, the idea that badgers live in the countryside at all is strange and unnatural, since our young minds were formulated under the influence of a badger who is far from rural in his lifestyle. Badger is a perennial child, mischievous innocent and lovable cockney. For us, to kill the badger is psychologically unhealthy. To kill the badger is to kill yourself.


Unit 2. The Badger as Gentleman.

Kenneth Grahame's Badger, in The Wind in the Willows (1908) is more of an establishment figure, treated with deference and senior to his companions both in age and wisdom. His outlook is conservative. It surprises me that any patriot or traditionalist can be in favour of culls, when surely Badger is the embodiment of a nostalgic ideal. It suggests to me that conservatives who favour the culls were not read to enough in their childhoods, and this parental neglect expresses itself in an attitude to authority which both espouses old-fashioned values and vents their subconscious desire to kill their fathers, who wounded them with emotional detachment.


3. The Badger as Fear.

 Now we have it. This is the badger as chaos, as enigma, as a threat in teddy-bear's clothing. Notice how the badger multiplies uncontrollably, and is associated with poisonous elements of nature. The twenty-first century badger combines the menace of wildness with the alienation of highly developed technology. It is a subversion of the friendly and humanised badger of the twentieth century. It may even be in some sort of gang. It's starting a riot.

Unit 4. The Badger as Badger.

That's better.

I feel a bit sick after this mammal-themed wallow and I think I know why. It's because pictures of animals have little to do with animals. It's because we grow up lavishing affection on Peter Rabbit, or a pet rabbit, but also with the gradual absorption of the idea that it's ok and more adult to enjoy the same creature in the form of rabbit pie. It goes back to what I said about Nim Chimpsky: we enjoy animals when we give them aspects of the human, but take away those fictionalised attributes and leave them as they actually are - real, sentient creatures - and it's ok to treat them with complete callousness. Saying this, as we do implicitly, is saying that we only care for ourselves. Or, that we can admire something cute or beautiful, but the enjoyment we get out of it does not extend to respecting it, or valuing things that are outside of our enjoyment.

I expect anyone who looks at this will have grown out of cartoon animals. It would be nice if adulthood necessarily meant growing into caring about the real thing.