English literature is well striped with badgers: sometimes bad (Beatrix Potter’s Tommy Brock, who kidnaps baby rabbits and keeps them in his oven for his tea), but mainly good (kindly old Badger in The Wind in the Willows). In the 21st century, most of us adore them, albeit from afar. The exception is those Boggis, Bunce and Bean types – Fantastic Mr Fox lovers will know I mean farmers – who believe they spread bovine TB to cattle, and must therefore be slaughtered. And farmers, of course, are moderately powerful. Governments, especially Tory ones, sometimes listen to them. Between 2011 and 2023, more than 230,000 badgers were culled in England and Wales (the UK population is currently about 485,000).
Brian May, the animal-loving Queen guitarist, is not at all happy about this (woah, bit of an unexpected change of direction here!). In a new BBC documentary, he sets out to save them by attempting to prove they’re not guilty as charged – which would make the cull pointless as well as morally dubious. How does he go about this? In the end, it’s pretty simple. First, his friendly vet Dick Sibley radically improves testing among a single herd to isolate carriers of TB; then, having found that transmission may occur cow-to-cow via the animals’ dung, he encourages severely improved barnyard hygiene. Pretty soon, the herd is TB-free, even as the nearby badger population is still infected. Ta-dah! Case closed. Brian can now get back to practising “Fat Bottomed Girls” with Adam Lambert.
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