Second: “No, no! That’s an otter. I know what an otter is. A badger is more like a ferret or weasel.” First: “Yes, I believe you’re right, but I fancy it’s larger than that.” Second: “How big would you say?” First: “Oh, I don’t know exactly, but nearly as big as a hare.” Second: “Oh, of course! They used to bait badgers with dogs; they must be larger than a ferret.” And so they went on, much to my amusement; and when they had set up their badger, I rather cruelly knocked it over, and gave them a little elementary education on the badger and his ways. Now, these two persons had both of them a natural disposition to be interested in badgers, and, astounding as is the ignorance of thousands who are fond of animal life, it requires but a very few words to arouse their interest in the rarer species of wild animals that we can still boast of as British. The fact is, since the cruel and brutalising sport of badger-baiting has been stamped out, the badger has been forgotten except by a few naturalists, sportsmen, and by the gamekeeper. Being neither furred nor feathered game, the keeper, of course (where his master’s wishes to the contrary are not expressed), treats him as vermin and wages war on all his tribe. With all their good qualities, keepers are too apt to consider that nothing but game has any right to live in an English covert. The mousing owl he spares not, flitting through the twilight dim, The beak it wears, it is, he swears, too hook’d a one for him. In every woodland songster he suspects a secret foe, His ear no music toucheth, save the roosting pheasant’s crow. Down go the falcons, the buzzards, the hawks, the jays, the magpies, the owls, the woodpeckers, the kingfishers, and any other bird that “wears a beak too hook’d,” or a dress gaudy enough to attract his attention. Badgers and squirrels are put into the same category as polecats, stoats, and weasels, and with almost as little compunction. Yet a badger is practically harmless to game, though I will not pretend to acquit him of the charge of taking a rabbit out of a snare, or of digging out a nest of young rabbits on occasion. He is, however, death on small vermin and such pests as wasps, though his main food consists of roots, fruits, wild honey, beetles, and insects. I believe that badgers eat slugs, but I have placed dishes of assorted kinds, from big black to small white, before my tame ones, and never could induce them to partake of them.