Badger medicine

This is photograph I took several years ago in Stroud from where I live up Rodborough Hill. I still remember my great delight at the experience of actually bumping into badgers in the street around the late hours; the hairy bulky bumpkins caught having a nosey about, and then charging off like small-bears down the road when I came their blunt claws going scratch-scratch on the tarmac. I spotted this badger one morning coming down from the house opposite, and felt rather privileged at the thought that I alone may have only seen this strange, woodland character poking about with a generally easy air. Before I came to Stroud I had had few live encounters with badgers, and certainly none in my street in Bath. I knew these strange and hairy striped beasts were out there in the woods but other than that merely cerebral knowledge, I had yet to know how they were in the flesh. Today as I go tappity-tappity on these keyboard keys in the English countryside I am quite aware of the whole pie happening with the badger cull; with half the public on one side protesting against it, the government saying the badgers need to kept under control because of bovine TB, and farmers inbetween supporting the cull or either vaccinations. Now the government is running trial culls in West Somerset and West Gloucestershire.
Badgers are among the nearly exhaustive list of other-than-human victims over the world who are being targeted, and framed as some kind of pest to the good running order of civilization. In Borneo and Sumatra where the palm oil plantations of pure evil are levelling the rainforests for temporary profiteering, orang-utans suffer as the plantations encroach on their habitat and the dispossessed apes are turned into 'vermin' by the industry whose imperative is to expand and eliminate: or squash the ecosystem, swell the business.
The persecution of badgers here in England may seem on another scale to the murder of orang-utans in palm oil plantations on the otherside of the world, but I don't think it is. Badgers, along with all other animals who struggle to exist within the imposed monocultures and building developments, are not really being understood as sentient beings with their own needs to shelter, food, and space. The kind of shelter, food and space all animals have in England is of a marginalised sort, with farmland and urban areas often fragmenting wild areas into pockets that just escape being carved up. For the sake of animals and diversity, we should create 'wild belts' that connect across whole regions as a series of habitats where animals can thrive. Another point is that modern agriculture is being thought of as though it exists outside the surrounding ecology, and that if any problems occur within its operations (such as bovine TB) they have to come from outside the farming system (I.e the surrounding ecology) and not within its own functions which are accepted somehow as efficient and faultless.
Possibly some badgers are giving the cows bovine TB, but why then are we having to rear so many cows on the land that a disease epidemic among them becomes a nations agricultural dilemma! I'm aware we live in a time where the consumption of meat is very high among the population. We demand meat from our farmers like kids milking their parents for more and more treats to keep them happy, without realising the parents have to go out and earn a living so they can buy you those 'treats'. With this pressure from consumers and the market for more and cheaper from the producers, standards go down and everybody is caught in an insane business of churning out as fast as possible the stuff wanted at the other end of the line.
The cows caught in this industrial consumerist diarrhoea, are like all the products that land on a supermarket shelf doubtlessly not the strongest or healthiest farm animals; even if they have had a decent life the pervasive pressure on them to yield enough for the supermarkets to keep the farmer contracted, must surely reduce their capacity to resist disease. Like the soil we are intensively farming and monoculturally cropping today the farm animals likewise trapped inbetween the market and consumer, must be experiencing a diminishing of their whole health as they are being made to give beyond what naturally they can.
The badgers cannot be blamed as though they are purposefully spreading disease to the cows. Because the situation has been removed from the bigger picture, from the labyrinth of life: why is everything, including us, suffering today from so much disease, disorder and diminishing of vitality!
Ok folks lets have some badger medicine, poetry from the Roaring Poet:
       
          Badger Ballad

        Woodland kinfolk.   
        
        Their earth houses,
        loam rubbed bare,
        low slung rises, 
        among the ramsons.
        
        wearing thick cloak of fur, 
        stripe flashes whitish from eyes,
        like an arrow across flanks. 
        
        Keeping snout straight ahead, 
         rolls a hefty shadow; 
         gruffly, tough 
         loam shuttler.
         
         Tree's assured by his presence, 
          down among roots, 
          an extended family; 
           grooming each other
           raising young,
          bickering for space,
          biting each other to move out the way. 

         Not liking to be disturbed,
         the night is perturbed by,
          wierd bawlings and babels 
          among bins: 
          fierce eyes rove hungry. 

          eyes that know the treasures, 
          of streets waiting for the rubbish collection.
          
         Behind the scenes, 
         always an extended family; 
         loving,
         bickering, 
         biting off fleas,
         beneath the roots of trees.