Friday, September 21, 2012
Badgers
The way in which we can get worked up over the fate of selected animals is an odd and enduring - but not endearing - feature of the English scene, a thought prompted by extensive coverage in yesterday's Guardian of the great badger scandal, that is to say that our security service is gearing up to slaughter millions and millions innocent baby badgers, deemed - or doomed - to be a threat to the state of the nation.
One strand of this is the way this particular sort of animal cause seems to draw in all kinds of people fully up for gung-ho activity (of a sort which reminds me both of the wide games we used to play in the Boy Scouts and the paint ball games played by those a little older, all of which can be played at night, in the woods), activity which can easily lurch from oh so very worthy fun into the dangerous and illegal.
Greenpeace people and the anti-GM people get up to the same kind of tricks. Perhaps it all scratches at an anarchic urge, a reaction to our so-ordered and (so the sociologists tell us) so-empty lives. Cuddling a smelly baby badger and getting one over a would be badger culler puts meaning back into my life. Or is it more like one of those cults we used to wring our hands about, the sorts of outfits which sweep up all sorts of vulnerable misfits? I am also reminded of the people who were jury acquitted of destroying a field of maize with fire, despite there being no doubt that they had done this very expensive deed, on purpose and with malice aforethought, at farmer and taxpayer expense.
Leaving aside sentiment about the fate of some badgers - the numbers of which I presume to be piffling in comparison to the number of pigs slaughtered in the name of sausages and pies - I am not very clear on the merits of the business. I understand that there are an awful lot of badgers about these days, although I am neither sure why this should be nor privy to what damage they might do, to crops for instance - apart from carrying TB, TB which does damage dairy herds. Badgers are quite large animals and must need a fair amount of grub to keep going. Do they graze off fields of turnips otherwise intended to feed the pigs to make the sausages and pies? But whether the rather large sounding costs of culling the badgers is justified by the results in bovine health in much less clear - although if I was one of the many struggling small dairy farmers, I dare say I would go for any initiative paid for out of central funds which might help.
At least in my young days we used to demonstrate about something which was both wrong and important, even if the manner of the demonstration was at times silly. I still firmly believe that the world would have been a better place had the US desisted from interfering in the affairs of Vietnam - and a lot more people would have been able to live out their lives in relative peace & quiet than was in fact the case. It was also a lot more damage than, as it happened, we had managed in Kenya just a few years previously, but damage about which I knew nothing until much more recently. I don't remember there being any demonstrations about it, although one or two eminences, for example Barbara Castle, did have an honourable go.
One strand of this is the way this particular sort of animal cause seems to draw in all kinds of people fully up for gung-ho activity (of a sort which reminds me both of the wide games we used to play in the Boy Scouts and the paint ball games played by those a little older, all of which can be played at night, in the woods), activity which can easily lurch from oh so very worthy fun into the dangerous and illegal.
Greenpeace people and the anti-GM people get up to the same kind of tricks. Perhaps it all scratches at an anarchic urge, a reaction to our so-ordered and (so the sociologists tell us) so-empty lives. Cuddling a smelly baby badger and getting one over a would be badger culler puts meaning back into my life. Or is it more like one of those cults we used to wring our hands about, the sorts of outfits which sweep up all sorts of vulnerable misfits? I am also reminded of the people who were jury acquitted of destroying a field of maize with fire, despite there being no doubt that they had done this very expensive deed, on purpose and with malice aforethought, at farmer and taxpayer expense.
Leaving aside sentiment about the fate of some badgers - the numbers of which I presume to be piffling in comparison to the number of pigs slaughtered in the name of sausages and pies - I am not very clear on the merits of the business. I understand that there are an awful lot of badgers about these days, although I am neither sure why this should be nor privy to what damage they might do, to crops for instance - apart from carrying TB, TB which does damage dairy herds. Badgers are quite large animals and must need a fair amount of grub to keep going. Do they graze off fields of turnips otherwise intended to feed the pigs to make the sausages and pies? But whether the rather large sounding costs of culling the badgers is justified by the results in bovine health in much less clear - although if I was one of the many struggling small dairy farmers, I dare say I would go for any initiative paid for out of central funds which might help.
At least in my young days we used to demonstrate about something which was both wrong and important, even if the manner of the demonstration was at times silly. I still firmly believe that the world would have been a better place had the US desisted from interfering in the affairs of Vietnam - and a lot more people would have been able to live out their lives in relative peace & quiet than was in fact the case. It was also a lot more damage than, as it happened, we had managed in Kenya just a few years previously, but damage about which I knew nothing until much more recently. I don't remember there being any demonstrations about it, although one or two eminences, for example Barbara Castle, did have an honourable go.
# posted by Jim @ 1:55 AM 
