Background - Part Two, 'Surveying'

Day to day life at the unit revolved around badgers.

'Triplet' areas were selected in areas of high bTB incidence, and our first task was to survey all three areas of each triplet and record all badger activity.

The first triplet area would be 'survey only'.  In other words, we'd do an initial survey, and then repeat the exercise at regular intervals.  

The second triplet area was 'reactive'.  We would carry out the initial survey, and then any farm which went down with bTB would have all the badgers living on it trapped, following another survey.  Once trapping was completed, another survey was carried out.

The third area would have all the badgers removed, regardless of the bTB status of the individual farms.

That was the theory anyway........

In reality, our day to day lives mostly consisted of surveying and paperwork.  The animal rights people made our lives very difficult, and secrecy became more and more important the more time went on.

I'll give you an example of what impact the animal rights people had on us.

We were tasked with trapping some badgers on infected farms in one of the reactive areas.  We went onto the farms, surveyed, sited traps and prebaited them.  The prebait period often extended into weeks, as we were only instructed to 'set to catch' once a sufficient number of badgers were feeding comfortably in the traps.

The animal rights people used many different tactics to frustrate our work.  Intimidation and threats of violence against us, and our families were used to little effect, and their most successful methods of disruption involved following us around watching from a safe distance while we set up the cage traps, and then moving in after we had left to either disable the trap, or simply cut it into pieces with bolt croppers.  Sometimes they just waited and watched; on the morning after the instruction to 'set to catch' we would turn up to find empty cages where they had either let the badgers out, or worse still, take them away for release elsewhere (often taking TB with them).

This was how the job worked.

As a unit, we were a tight knit bunch.  We had to be.  Everyone got on well together, and we prided ourselves on doing a good job.  I was proud of the unit, and glad to be part of it; although few of us spoke of our work outside the safety of the unit.