Warning: incoming badger-hate!

In that august journal of science and understanding, the Daily Mail, Matt Ridley has been showing off his reading - and with equal skill, showing off his ignorance.

Please pop over to THIS version to join the conversation

In an article that tries to claim a backing of science the headline reads

‘The ruthless black and white menace that's the real reason you never see Mrs Tiggy Winkle in your garden anymore’

Illustrated with a species of hedgehog found only in Africa, or as a pet … would be nice if they could get the species correct ….

The first paragraph begins with some lack of truth -

‘Britain's hedgehogs are disappearing. The chief reason is well known to scientists but rarely spoken about by campaigners, naturalists, wildlife television presenters and journalists – who appear to have mostly agreed to turn a blind eye to the true cause of the decline of one of Britain's favourite creatures.’

Let’s unpick that - there is no evidence that badgers are the chief reason hedgehog numbers are declining, and the issue is not ‘rarely spoken about’ - as he would know if he had been to any of my talks. The hedgehog research world completely understands that badgers can, and do, eat hedgehogs. We know very well that badgers create a landscape of fear reducing the ability of hedgehogs to move through the landscape.

And if he had scratched a deeper than his anti-badger prejudice allowed he would have found this statement from the Hedgehog Street campaign.

And also found this report on the research by Katie Lee from Nottingham Trent University.

Ridley’s article is a return to a rather tired attempt to distract the public from the true damage that industrial agriculture is doing to the countryside. In his article he minimises the impact that decades of extreme extraction, compaction, and toxification have had on the land and the life that tries to live there.

He quite reasonably asks:

‘But why should badgers suddenly be such a problem for hedgehogs? After all, the two species have coexisted for millions of years.’

And then goes on to give an unexpected (and probably unintentional) bit of support to ReWilding ….

‘The answer is simple. Badgers now live at unnaturally high densities in Britain thanks to three factors: lack of predators, abundance of human food and legal protection.

‘Without wolves, bears, wolverines and the like, badgers need fear only people and people have not been allowed to kill or even disturb them since 1992 – about the time hedgehog numbers started declining steeply.’

He is missing out some rather crucial data … the National Gamebag Counts - data from gamekeepers - showed clearly that between 1981 and 1991, so before badgers were protected, hedgehog numbers fell 25%.

The criticism of legal protection - that is not there incidentally. There is a strong desire to roll back the protection that badgers receive - they are the largest land predator left in the country - all the others have been done for - and they are blamed for the spread of bovine TB (for which there is little evidence). A return to the cruel free-for-all pre-1992 is not something I imagine most of us would like to see. 

The reason badgers are as abundant as they there can, in part, be explained by the action of many of those who would like to see them vilified in the press … we have been growing an amazing crop of badgers, thanks, among many things, to massive planting of maize.

And badgers, along with the foxes and crows Ridley complains about, are also benefiting from the absurdity of pheasant shooting … captive breeding of a non-native species in obscene quantities, such that at the peak, over half the total biomass of ‘wild’ birds in the UK is made up of pheasants and, to a less extent, partridges.

Nearly 50 million are released each year for the inadequate and incompetent to play with - shooting for fun. By the spring there are fewer than 5 million. Now, the crackshot crackpots have not eaten 45 million pheasant! Many die after being wounded, still more live out their lives until disease, cold, starvation, or predators get them.

This then creates a massive distortion in the farmed ecosystem - so much food for the badgers, foxes, and crows. Who are then vilified by Ridley and his gang of land-owning chums.

Add to this that pheasants scour hedgerows for hedgehog food … I think that Ridley would be better investigating the impact that pheasants have on hedgehogs.

Now, this is not to say that there is conservation concern about the badger/hedgehog dynamic. The question is what can we do, within the law, to improve the chances of both species coexisting?

The Hedgehog Street campaign has produced a detailed guide for land-managers and farmers, with really good advice.

If Ridley had taken the trouble to read this, then maybe he would have written a better-informed article.

 He closes with:

‘In the Disneyfied imagination of too many animal charities, predation is never a problem. But we are derelict in our duty if we ignore it. If we refuse to control badgers, the demise of the hedgehog will be on our conscience.’

We can help hedgehogs, and we already are, by our actions in suburbia and we can help hedgehogs by encouraging sustainable, regenerative agriculture through the choices we make when we buy food.

And just in case that Ridley decides I am coming to this argument with too much bias, I must point him towards my recent, award-winning book, Cull of the Wild - Killing in the Name of Conservation.

Thank you to Nick Withers for the photo of the badger murdering some gorse flowers!