(c)2026 Badger Trust Isle of Wight
Island populations of any animal whether fox or badger is of interest. In my two Red Papers I looked at island foxes as well as island wild cats. Badgers on islands indicate two things:
1. They are an ancient population inhabiting the island since it became water locked.
2. They were transported to the island simply to introduce them there or for hunting/hunting reasons -badgers were being caught and transported all over England in the second half of the 19th century.
If (1) then they need DNA testing and to be studied and given full protection by the law and not subjected to any cull.
If it is (2) then records need to be search for when the introduction started. Foxes were transported to the Isle of Man, Isle of Wight, etc for hunting purposes.; Because of the introduction of mange due to the poor conditions imported foxes faced before being sold on it became a problem noted in thw 18th and 19th centuries.
Hunt masters would kill any population where mange was seen even if the foxes appeared healthy the fact that one had mange meant the entire population had to be killed -cubs and all. Some bright spark decided that foxes had mange due to them being dirty animals and not cleaning out their dens. Badgers didn't have mange and were seen as clean and they cleared out their setts daily. No one accused hunt masters of having high IQs but they worked out that if they got badgers and put them into fox dens their constant cleaning out would mean future foxes did not face mange.
Your brain can hurt if you try to work this all out logically. If the foxes were alive then badgers could not be moved in. If the foxes were gone and the badgers moved in to clean up an area before more imported foxes arrived...where did the badgers go? Where they killed or moved on to another hunting territory?
It is very odd to write that after centuries of melecide the badgers of England only survived because they seemed useful to fox hunts. Otherwise like the original British fox and wild cat badgers would now be extinct -for 'sport' they were not much use ("unless there is a shortage of foxes") so would not have been trapped in Europe and imported in their thousands as foxes, deer, hare, red squirrels and other species were.
Which means that if (2) then we know why -unless some local squire wanted to have a "typically English animal" on his property.
The history of island canids and felids is interesting but island badgers are never mentioned.
Interestingly, every search will tell you that foxes and badgers are absent on the Isle of Man and yet we know from records (written not online because internetters do not study archives) that there are foxes there -again, imported for 'sport' in the 19th century. And:
"No Extant Population: Reports of badger sightings are rare and usually considered to be escapees, not a established population." Escaped from where? The fact that there is no bovine TB on the Isle is stated to be proof that badgers do not exist there and yet that claim of badger introduced bTB can be shot down over and over again.
Removing a badger from an island population, say an orphaned cub, would or should be difficult since there would be questions re. any disease introduction OR if returned back to the island the risk of bTB.
There are a lot of questions about island populations but dogma (spread by armchair 'experts' and internet bloggers) has taken the place of field work. Why get wet and cold when you can just copy and paste 'facts'?
Badgers actually went extinct on the Isle of Wight by 1909. The current population stems from about a dozen badgers introduced in the 1920s by the local hunt.
.jpg)
