Putting my Sett In Order

Me and my Clan had a busy night starting the big Autumn sett cleaning getting ready for winter.  This is my sett, or house, as the Humans would call it:

We Badgers are very good at digging and have large tunnels plus our bedrooms, nurseries and socialising areas underground.  We are very clean creatures and we go outside to take a poo, quite a long way from home.  We make comfortable beds with straw, leaves and anything else comfy we can find.  We have a good clear out very often so everything smells lovely.

We Badgers are not very keen on Cows.  This is a cow:

One problem with Cows is that they poo a great deal and tread it all over the fields so we keep well away from anywhere that Cows feed.  The type of Humans called Farmers are very fond of Cow poo, so much so that they collect it in slurry pits and then spread it all over the fields. Here is a picture of slurry (Cow poo) spreading:



We Badgers have learned that if we go near the fields where this Cow poo has been spread we can sometimes get a bad cough, so we stay well away if we can.  Other animals get these coughs too, such as the Deer, Pigs and Goats and Cats and Dogs.  My Human friend Bob tells me this cough is called Bovine Tuberculosis, or Cow TB or BTB.  It is NOT Badger TB, but Bob just told me that the DEFRA is killing us Badger folk because of BTB.  This doesn't seem very fair at all.  So my Brian was killed by the Humen because of Cow poo.  What a strange and cruel world.

Still me and my friends had a good night after we did all our autumn cleaning as Bob left us some peanuts again and this made us very happy.  Here is a picture of me eating peanuts.

Just one apology before I go out foraging.  I said last night that it was the Daily Llama who said that you could judge a country by the way it treats its animals.  Well, actually I was in a bit of a rush and I just remembered that it was in fact Mahatmah Gandalf who said that,  who I think was a wizard with a beard and glasses who lived in India, a place where they really like cows.  

The Daily Llama, or Dalai Lama as Bob calls him, did say some pretty nice things about animals though, such as, "Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not die, so do other creatures". I would like to take issue on calling us mute though; you should hear us when we mate!

Goodnight Humans