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.

AgriCullture

Very good article in the Guardian today, which describes the badger vaccination programme being deployed in Gloucester over the next five years. As well as starting with a thrilling mini-adventure about a badger called 007 (lured into a cage with peanuts, hence the cartoon) the  article discusses the pros and cons of using vaccination to deal with bovine TB, instead  of culling. On the one hand, it is humane and doesn't cause perturbation, which is a major drawback with the culling method. On the other, vaccination will not result in immediately dramatic improvements in TB hotspots (it's a vaccination, not a cure: there will still be infected badgers) and it is prohibitively expensive.

The coalition government is characteristically uninterested in planning for long-term solutions when it can butcher budgets: five vaccination schemes were cancelled in 2010 on cost grounds, though one potential contractor claimed that estimated costs were inflated by 'red tape and bureaucracy.'

The thing to remember is that bTB is a disease that badgers caught from cows, and cows (or rather, the farming industry) are the reason that we all have to fuss about badgers being poorly in the wilderness. The obvious solution, and one that is much more practicable than taking potshots at a protected, wild, nocturnal animal, is to vaccinate the cows.

Bureaucracy really is the villain here: cows that have been vaccinated against TB may have a positive reaction to the tuberculin skin test, which the EU uses to identify infected livestock. I can identify with this experience - when I was at school I wasn't given the BCG vaccine because when they gave me the skin test I  came up with a rash like a plate of salami. It meant that I was already immune. Because they get these reactions, immunised cows cannot be declared TB-free, according to EU law, and cannot be exported. It's all pretty stupid.

I am in favour of vaccination programmes like the one in Gloucester. I am even more in favour of developing an oral vaccine. But for the speedy easing of a crisis that can cost farmers up to £3.5 k a month, and has demanded hundreds of millions from the taxpayer over the last ten years, changing the EU testing method so that it can distinguish immunity from infection, thus enabling the vaccination of cows, is by a long way the most sensible solution.

Big Top Society

Just a  few words about the recent agreement by MPs to introduce a ban on wild animals in circuses.

It's an excellent motion: it isn't binding, it isn't an 'immediate possibility' (in the words of Ministers who tried to scupper it, despite its being backed by parliamentary and public opinion) and it isn't going to happen until after the outcome of a legal challenge to a similar ban in Austria has been decided.

The official reason for the government holding back on the ban, preferring to mumble about the possibility of reinforcing existing laws, is that a ban might infringe the rights of circus owners under European Law, though as Allegra Stratton points out, the European Commission does allow individual members to make exceptions on animal welfare grounds.

Mary Creagh, Shadow Environment Secretary, described the government's handling of the motion as 'confused.' This presumably refers to the botched three-line whip that the Conservatives put out against voting in favour of the ban, and to their policy of acknowledging the obligation laid on them to take action while persisting in their obvious unwillingness to do so. It could be said that their sympathies lie with entrepreneurial circus-owners (and the performing animal company in Cameron's constituency) but it seems to me this is typical of the way the Tories tread water over animal welfare issues, in a way that ultimately does no good to man or beast.

Take their handling of the impending badger cull, which Caroline Spelman is 'strongly minded' to back. If the current government had shown more strength of mind they might be offering to deliver on the previous government's promise of an oral vaccine for badgers by 2015. This solution would be more reliably effective than the hugely expensive culls (likely to cost in the region of £92 million), which carry with them the risk if not likelihood of perturbation (whereby TB escalates in  areas surrounding the culling hotspots). The government seems to have put the kibosh on vaccination, and is apparently committed to frustrating progress in animal welfare whenever it can.

The Conservatives' behaviour over the circus issue seems particularly characteristic because the preservation of old-style circuses fits in with the Enid Blytonesque aesthetic of Cameron's fantastical Big Society, where we all head down to the Big Top for some big laughs. Never mind a bit of entrenched cruelty or injustice, it's all in good fun.

Notably the embarrassingly chippy Tory MP Mark Pritchard - a self-described 'little council-house lad' and leader of the Parliamentary campaign for the ban - does not have a place in this vision.