Nature Notes - Cull-ture club and coughing cows

Ruddy ducks, bloody deer and bastard badgers are just three species to have the misfortune to find themselves on the front pages of the newspapers next to the word ‘cull’.

It’s hard to think of another creature as inoffensive as a duck, unless you are a loaf of bread in which case you probable have a lot to fear.  Only my nephew can challenge a duck when it comes to a complete lack of guile.  This is a child that was once outwitted by a goat, a tale still referred to round the dinner table by the title ‘Billy and the trousers’.  Deer, it would seem are a victim of their own success, they breed in numbers and rub their antlers on trees.  Well, obviously, something has to be done about this rutting arboreal menace.

The problem for badgers is not that traditional shaving brushes have suddenly become very fashionable but rather that they give cattle bovine TB.  Whether they sneak up behind an unsuspecting cow in dead of night with a syringe full of the stuff, or whether they just cough on them has not been made clear.  What has been made clear is that cows make milk and therefore money while badgers make beloved characters in childrens’ literature but this is not enough to prevent them from the sort of persecution until recently reserved for kiddyfiddlers, 1970s teevee personalities or, worst of all, kiddyfiddling 1970s teevee personalities, the cull of which has also been front page news.

 If coughing cows is not reason enough to dislike them, Nazis obviously had badger sympathies, as is evidenced by their sharing of the same colour scheme.  All footage of Nazis shows them in black and white.

Culling is a traditional country pastime and one imagines that rather than Predator Drone strikes, traditional country cruelty will be employed.