Life, Worms and Politics of the British Badger
The British badger, or Meles meles if you want to sound like you’re on first-name terms with a zoologist, is a creature that looks like it’s stepped straight out of folklore and into your garden. Chunky, monochrome, and perpetually busy digging something, it’s one of Britain’s most recognisable animals and also one of the most controversial. On one hand, it’s the wise and gruff Mr Badger from The Wind in the Willows. On the other, it’s the accused spreader of bovine tuberculosis and subject of nationwide culls. Few animals embody such a contradiction: adored and detested, cuddly and destructive, a mascot and a menace all at once.
The badger’s aesthetic is iconic. That black-and-white striped face looks painted by an overzealous makeup artist with a thing for symmetry. The rest of the body is a silvery grey coat, dense and coarse, perfectly suited to the damp British climate. Badgers are built like small tanks — short legs, muscular shoulders, and claws that could put a manicure out of business in seconds. They use those claws to excavate elaborate underground homes called setts. Some of these tunnel systems are older than the hedgerows they sit beneath, passed down through generations like family estates. A well-established sett can have dozens of entrances, multiple sleeping chambers, and even separate nursery rooms. You might think of it as the original British semi-detached, except with more worms and fewer estate agents.
Badgers are creatures of habit. They live in family groups, known as clans or cetes, usually a dozen strong. They’re sociable but not overly sentimental — if food runs short, the more dominant badgers will assert their right to first dibs. Yet, for the most part, they maintain a surprisingly cooperative existence, sharing duties like foraging and cleaning out the sett. Each clan fiercely defends its patch of countryside with scent marking, a territorial strategy that involves more bodily fluids than one might care to imagine.
Come dusk, the badger world wakes up. They are nocturnal wanderers, slipping out of their setts in the twilight to forage through hedgerows and fields. Their favourite dish? Earthworms. Lots and lots of them. A single badger can slurp up a few hundred worms in a night, often with the same single-mindedness one might reserve for late-night snacks. When worms are scarce, they diversify: beetles, small mammals, fruits, roots, crops, and even the occasional wasp nest if they’re feeling adventurous. The badger is nothing if not resourceful. There are stories of them raiding orchards for apples and even sifting through compost bins in suburban gardens. The British badger, it seems, doesn’t believe in letting a good meal go to waste.
The romance of the badger lies not just in its looks or habits but in the mythology that’s grown around it. For centuries, it’s been seen as a creature of wisdom and resilience. In Celtic folklore, it symbolised determination and protection of the home. Some tales describe badgers as shape-shifters who could turn into humans — or perhaps that’s just a reflection of their uncanny ability to navigate the social politics of the countryside. Mr Badger, from Kenneth Grahame’s book, is the archetype of this image: stern, loyal, pragmatic, and slightly reclusive. You can almost imagine him lecturing a government committee about woodland management with a cigar in hand.
Yet despite this cosy reputation, real-life badgers live under a constant cloud of suspicion. The long-running debate over whether they spread bovine tuberculosis has turned them into reluctant political figures. Successive governments have launched culling programmes across England, claiming it helps control the disease in cattle. Scientists have argued for decades about the effectiveness of these culls, and the public remains fiercely divided. Conservationists call the culls unethical and unscientific; farmers call them necessary. Meanwhile, the badgers themselves go about their nocturnal business, blissfully unaware of the PR crisis raging above ground.
There’s irony in the fact that one of the countryside’s most efficient diggers is now at the centre of a bureaucratic trench war. Some experts argue that killing badgers disrupts their social structures, prompting survivors to roam further afield — potentially spreading the very disease the cull aims to stop. Others champion vaccination schemes as a more humane alternative. But vaccination is costly, slow, and requires cooperation across hundreds of farms. It’s a stalemate where emotion, economics, and ecology collide.
Beyond politics, the British badger plays a vital ecological role. They are what biologists call ‘ecosystem engineers’ — animals that reshape their environment in ways that benefit others. Their burrowing aerates the soil, helping plants thrive. Their abandoned setts become homes for foxes, rabbits, and even bats. And their habit of eating fruit and excreting seeds helps with woodland regeneration. In short, they do a lot more for the countryside than most of us give them credit for.
Unfortunately, it’s not just policy that threatens them. Badgers face danger on the roads — thousands are killed each year in traffic collisions. Habitat loss also looms large, as new developments eat into the patchwork of woodlands and hedgerows that badgers rely on. Despite legal protections under the Protection of Badgers Act 1992, illegal persecution still occurs. Badger baiting, a cruel pastime thought long gone, persists in pockets of rural Britain. It’s hard to imagine how a species so emblematic of the British countryside could still be hunted for sport, but the shadows of old cruelties linger.
Still, the species is resilient. There are an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 badgers across Britain, making them one of the country’s most successful large mammals. They’ve even adapted to suburban life — badgers have been spotted trotting through housing estates, foraging in compost heaps, and excavating lawns as though reclaiming lost territory. Some wildlife enthusiasts run badger-watching tours in the countryside, offering visitors the chance to sit quietly in the dark and watch these striped diggers shuffle through the undergrowth. It’s a uniquely British experience: part meditation, part wildlife documentary, and entirely dependent on one’s ability to stay quiet and not sneeze.
In a way, the badger is a metaphor for Britain itself — ancient, stubborn, occasionally misunderstood, and fiercely protective of its territory. Its setts, those intricate underground cities, are living records of generations that have survived wars, farming revolutions, and urban sprawl. To stand on a field above one is to be literally walking on history.
If you happen to see one snuffling across a country lane at dusk, resist the urge to think of it as just another animal. That’s a creature whose ancestors watched woolly mammoths graze, who has outlived Roman legions, and who still insists on maintaining a very British sense of privacy. It is both relic and rebel, a reminder that beneath the polite veneer of hedgerows and cricket fields, there’s a wilder Britain quietly going about its business underground.