"Sir,—Undoubtedly; every one that they can get near, and more especially hand-reared cubs that have not got the old foxes to protect them. I was first told this by old Jem Hills, the well-known huntsman of the Heythrop, in his latter years; and subsequently I had positive proof of what he said. On one occasion a man brought a fine half-grown cub to my house which he had picked up dead in the road he came along. It was bitten most severely through and behind the shoulder, and I at once remarked to a friend that was with me, 'That is the work of a badger.' On going down to an earth where I knew there was a natural litter, we found tracks of a badger all about the place, as if he had been hunting the cubs. Having at the time eight cubs that I was hand-rearing in an artificial drain, I thought it was high time to look after them, for though regularly fed, I did not always watch to see whether they all came to feed. However, I did so that evening, and only two came, and these looked very wild and scared. I then searched the plantation, and picked up four of my cubs killed quite recently, and bitten in the same savage way. A few weeks after we killed a big boar badger in the drain. Several years later, I was again rearing some hand-bred cubs, and everything went well until they were a good size, when one morning I found one of them killed, evidently by a badger; and I eventually took four more of them, and the others were all driven away. This badger beat me for some little time, but I got him at last. Though old badgers and foxes are often found in the same earth, more frequently when one of the latter has been run to ground by hounds, yet, as a rule, they give each other wide berths. If your correspondent 'Wilfred' wishes to save his cubs, let him kill every badger as soon as possible."
"Sir,—Replying to 'Wilfred's' question, 'Do badgers kill fox cubs?' I cannot say they do, because there are no badgers in this district; but having at different times had young foxes killed in the way he describes, namely, bitten in the head, I can assure him that it is done by an old dog fox. Should he wish for further information, I refer him to Mr. John Douglas, Royal Hotel, Pudding Chare, Newcastle-on-Tyne, who will tell him of the experience he gained when at Clumber, under the Duke of Newcastle."
"Sir,—I may tell 'Wilfred' that I have never known old badgers kill fox cubs, though I have studied the habits of both for nearly forty years. No doubt an old vixen, with no cubs of her own, killed his; the dog fox will not do this. Indeed, he will cater for all the cubs of his own get, but a strange vixen is very apt to kill any cubs which have no mother of their own. I have known a terrier bitch kill a litter of foxhound puppies, and one of my Irish terriers will kill puppies if she has the chance. As to the 'natural' litter which 'Wilfred' found gone, they had merely been shifted by the vixen; as soon as the cubs get able to travel they are always shifted. Last year I had two tame wild ducks sitting in a hedge. A badger passed regularly within a yard of them every night, but they were undisturbed. This year a fox took one of them just before it hatched. I was sorry to read the other day in the Field an account of two old and four cub badgers having been dug out in Gloucestershire. There is surely no sport in this, and the badgers are destitute of grease now, whereas at Michaelmas they are fat enough to provide grease for all the rheumatic people in the parish. I like to catch one with my terriers when the harvest moon shines. Sometimes I get up in a convenient tree near the earth and watch the badgers feeding on the crazy roots. How fond they are of the wild bees' honey, and also of wasps' nests. Let me advise 'Wilfred' to read the exhaustive and interesting account given in a letter to the Times (October 24, 1877), and quoted in Cassell's Natural History, vol. ii. It thus concludes—'The badgers and the foxes are not unfriendly, and last spring a litter of cubs was brought forth very near the badgers; but their mother removed them after they had grown familiar, as she probably thought they were showing themselves more than was prudent.' Mr. Ellis of Loughborough was the author of the letter, and he had rare opportunities of studying the habits of badgers."
I am loth to do it, but wishing to be an impartial historian, am compelled to state that the badger is capable of vulpicide. As a rule he can put up with an occasional lodger of the fox family, and live happily with him, and from his superior qualities as an architect of subterranean dwellings, he is on the whole an encourager of foxes. He often gives up his spacious apartments to a vixen in the spring, and submits to eviction. A fox will often take possession of a badger's earth, new or old; and in order to persuade foxes to take to a particular covert, no surer method can be pursued than to get badgers to make earths when they are required. But even a badger's patience can be exhausted, as the following history of my own experience will show. I would premise, however, that I do not credit the oft-repeated story that the fox gets rid of the badger by leaving his evacuations in the badger's earth. Being the less and weaker animal, all a fox does is allowed on sufferance. My suspicions of a badger's capability to wage war on foxes were first aroused some years ago. The badgers had made a fine double set of earths on the north side, of a hill in a neighbouring larch wood, where no effort on my part to get foxes to breed and stay had succeeded. No sooner, however, was a colony of badgers established than foxes haunted the holes and covert. In a succession of years there was as certain to be a litter of fox cubs in the badger earth as a sunrise on the morrow.
What happened each spring was that the foxes and badgers frequented both sets indiscriminately till about March. When the vixen lay in the badgers abandoned the set of holes where she was, and restricted themselves to the other set some twenty yards distant. Year after year the fox cubs prospered and grew up, till one summer the keeper found a fox cub in a field with his head bitten in two and terribly worried. I did not know how to account for it. I watched the vixen and the other cubs one evening to see that they were all right, and saw them, but found they had left the earth and were in the covert. For two years all went well and the foxes were unmolested, and then occurred something that gave me a clue to the death of the cub three years before. Two vixens lay in at the badgers' earth, and brought up their families of seven and four respectively, till they were about one-third grown. There were then to my knowledge at least four badgers and twelve foxes in these two earths. On one or two occasions the stillness of the night was broken by the veriest pandemonium at the earth, but still I did not think much of it. At the end of the hunting season, at the end of April, when the cubs were seven or eight weeks old, and a fortnight after the hounds had been through the coverts, I found the largest and finest of the vixens dead, and thought that, in spite of the earths being open, she must have been chopped by the hounds. A post-mortem examination, as well as the improbability of a vixen with cubs being out in the early part of the day, convinced me that she had not been killed by hounds. She seemed to have been badly bitten through the legs and thighs but not on the body. From this time the other vixen and all the cubs left the badgers' earths and remained in the covert. It was on this occasion that an attempt to find out how many badgers there were in these earths was rewarded by seeing seven full-grown badgers emerge from a single hole. It was rough, no doubt, that the badgers should be invaded by two large families of smelling foxes, and no doubt their patience had become exhausted. Still I could not tolerate this kind of behaviour, and so I had a dig at them, took two old ones out, and transported them to Scotland. The following year there was peace and fox cubs again. The year after, however, the vixen and her cubs took off into the covert very early after another bit of Bank Holiday business, at a time of night when all respectable people were quietly in bed. And yet all through the year foxes are in the earth, and this spring, as heretofore, a litter of cubs has been raised, but removed to another earth at a safe distance from the badgers. I have never heard of badgers taking the offensive against foxes; they will never molest a fox or vixen unless their earth is invaded, and in my case if I had had no badgers in this covert I should have had no foxes; and whilst it is annoying that the fox cubs and vixen should be driven out, and perhaps occasionally killed, the drawback is slight when it is considered that as long as there are badgers there will be a litter of cubs, which nine times out of ten will get safely off.
There are every now and then albino badgers reported, but I have never seen one alive. I think, however, they are more subject to albinism than most animals. I do not know of a case of melanism.
"White Badger at Overton, Hants.—While digging for badgers on April 30, we came across two dog badgers in the same earth, one of which was quite white, the colour of a white ferret, with pink eyes. Unfortunately, the terriers punished him so much he had to be destroyed. I have helped to dig out a great many of these animals, but never saw nor heard of a white one before."—T. P.
PART III
There are several methods by which the badger can be taken alive, or killed, with ease. I am familiar with several successful ways of trapping him. The reader, if he is not aware of these, must not expect me to enlighten him, as my object in writing is to arouse an interest in his preservation, not to facilitate his destruction. It may be as well to state, however, that the inhuman engine, the steel trap (by which so many of the birds and beasts that frequented the wild woods of England and Scotland have been exterminated) is an instrument that arouses the suspicion of a badger at once, and he is as clever in avoiding it as an old-fashioned rat. The badger if caught in a steel trap will frequently bite his leg or foot clean off. In my opinion there are two legitimate methods of hunting the badger. First, that of a straight-forward attack on his fortress; and should it be an old-established earth, it may be the end of the longest day will not see the battle ended. There are, of course, the fortunes of war—a lucky engagement, a wrong turn on the part of the defender, a successful trench quickly cutting off his retreat—which may deliver him unexpectedly into your hands; or the enemy may outwit you altogether, conducting a masterful retreat, with gallant sorties on the dogs, and by continually changing his front drive you to abandon works, trenches, and operations that have cost great labour and time; thus you may be left with a tired and wounded pack of terriers, exhausted sappers, and the badger, having blocked and barricaded his retreat with soil, stones, and sand, is lost. The war thus made is an equal one: you attack him on his own ground in his fortress where he is acquainted with every passage, gallery, and casement; he is armed to the teeth and armour-plated, and can drive a road forward, downward, or upward with extraordinary rapidity. It is true you may have many terriers, but he has an advantage over your forces. Only one of your dogs can engage at a time, and the badger has the advantage of weight, size, knowledge of the ground, and familiarity with the dark—in fact, in every respect except those of courage and endurance, which in some terriers may equal his own. The other method, less sure, depends on taking the badger off his guard, and is more in the character of an ambuscade under cover of night. When the badgers are away from home you block up their earths, placing sacks with running nooses in the mouth, in the most frequented holes. Station one of your party near the "set," and you may either take a small pack of hounds and draw the country for a few miles round, and hunt him like a fox, getting a run across country and a fine cry; or you may beat the neighbouring coverts with men and dogs of any description that are trained to hunt the badger.
In the following, taken from an article which appeared in a newspaper, there is a good account of night hunting.
"Owing to his shy and retiring habits, rather than to the scarcity of the animal, probably less is known about the badger than about any wild animal left in England at the present time. There is a prevalent notion that the badger is exceedingly rare, and also that he is harmless; neither of these ideas is quite correct. In the west especially the badger is fairly common, but escapes notice owing to his retiring disposition. Whether he does harm to feathered game or not is a moot point, but his tracks have been distinctly noticed round plundered nests; it is certain, however, that he does great damage to ground game by digging out 'stops' of young rabbits in the spring and summer.