I know Eunice Overend very well indeed he said and gave an ambiguous chuckle

“I know Eunice Overend very well indeed,” he said, and gave an ambiguous chuckle. The badgers – surprisingly hefty, and distinctly piggy – appeared suddenly, scrambling towards us from various directions. Eunice carried a stick because one of the three had recently bitten her I – without a stick – felt rather nervous “He won’t bite you,” shouted Eunice. In the spring of most years she takes in stray cubs, to be released back into the wild in breeding groups, but this year she has three adults on her hands. She thrust two plates of fat, meat and fruit into my hands, and we headed towards her badger pounds. “We’d like the Ministry to sponsor a field trial of the vaccine, but they say you can’t have a field trial until you’ve shown that it works, and you can’t show it works with badgers in captivity because their stress levels are so high.”Dusk had fallen, and Eunice broke off.

“Most positive badgers are not infectious, and what causes them to become infectious is stress, which is increased by culling.”She wants to see a vaccine for badgers against TB, and favours one that has been developed by Dr John Stanford at Middlesex University and uses a type of killed soil bacteria. I’ve moved traps myself, here, and over the hill at the crack of dawn.”She especially regrets the ministry’s failure to distinguish between badgers that are postive with TB, and those that are infectious with it. They’re normal people, like the veal calf protesters, who are sick of of banging their heads against a brick wall. But of late, a certain froideur has crept in: “More and more people have been moving badger traps, and I wouldn’t condemn it. As a scientist, she is respected by MAFF: her conversation quickly becomes learned (“If only you knew about lymph nodes…

“, she will sigh).Eunice vigorously kicked a log into her caravan stove, shooed one of her three dogs out of the way (“Such a nuisance, but very good with the badgers – surrogate mother and all that”), then sat down on her bed to talk.For all her eccentricity, Eunice is a moderate badger person, who continues to be on good terms with the Ministry (“They call me, I call them”). Rather than cat flaps on the doors, there are badger flaps, and the caravan is surrounded by a complex of badger pounds. Eunice, who bears a slight facial resemblence to Mary Whitehouse and has a handshake like steel, is the only human being in a strictly hierarchical community: “Eunice on top, then dogs, then badgers.”Badgers have been Eunice’s main interest since she was a young woman, although, in a successful attempt to broaden her social circle, she branched out into bell-ringing in the Fifties. She used to be a biology teacher, and, after the war, went on to work with the naturalist Peter Scott at his bird sanctuary in Gloucestershire. It was pressure from the badger lobby that led to a series of Acts of Parliament to protect badgers and their setts from badger baiters and diggers, though it’s still possible to walk into a pub in, say, South Yorkshire and hear the muttered inquiry between terriermen: “You goin’ after Billy tonight?” What the badger lobby hopes to do now is rescue the 250,000 badgers in Britain from the depredations of MAFF.In that struggle, no one is more of a celebrity than Eunice Overend, who has been campaigning on “the TB thing” since the start of culling. She lives in a well-rooted caravan outside Castle Combe in Wiltshire. The Ministry is only killing badgers to be seen to be doing something.” Indeed; the pressure on the Ministry to do something is intense.

A farmer owning a cow that tests positive for TB can neither sell nor buy cattle for 72 days, the time that must pass before a second test confirms the presence or absence of the disease. Those 72 days can cause bankruptcy.The badger lobby is no match for the farming interest, but it has achieved a lot. “Even if it is badgers who are giving TB to cattle,” she says, “the policy of culling is not working. MAFF admits that it has never actually proved that badgers transmit TB to cattle.MARY JARVIE is unhappy. Both found “circumstantial evidence” connecting badgers with TB in cows: that is, they found a high correspondence between cases of TB in badgers and cases of TB in neighbouring cattle.